Project Rationale

They say you have to hear 1000 stories before you are ready to write your own. This is great news for a child coming in to primary school who has had a bedtime story every night of their life. Even assuming you don’t fully remember the ones from before you were 2 and that there have been some (many) repeats of particular favourites you will have comfortably had your 1000 story dose before you start school. But what if you don’t generally get a bedtime story?

Maybe you don’t have access to that many books, maybe you don’t have a ‘bedtime’ as such, maybe your family circumstances for any number of varied reasons mean that the capacity for sharing stories is limited. This means that the first time you are asked to make up a story in school you may not have a sense of what sort of thing ‘a story’ is. You don’t have a stock of go-to phrases like ‘Once Upon A Time’ which help you to put together ideas of your own, you haven’t heard hundreds of tales which have the happy beginning, the middle stage sense-of-jeopardy and the peaceful resolution which characterise so many familiar narratives. You may not even have the vocabulary to describe the idea that you have in your head.

In her brilliant and inspiring book ‘Upstart‘ Sue Palmer recalls an anecdote from a fellow literacy specialist Pie Corbett – he asked a range of children the simple question ‘Can you tell me a story?’  and whilst some could offer a reasonably coherent narrative there were many who could only offer disjointed words and phrases. One little boy just kept saying ‘fish’ and it eventually transpired that the title boy was trying to describe ‘Finding Nemo’ which he watched every night on DVD before bed – he had been exposed to the story in a visual form but had never heard a spoken narrative of the story.

When I read the story of The Little Boy Who Said ‘Fish’ I had been thinking about the different ways to support children to think about the ‘shape’ of stories and I also wanted to find a way to be sure that ALL of the children in our P1 cohort had heard all the UNMISSABLE picture books which form part of so many peoples understanding of story telling. So I designed The Once Upon A Time Project.

Project Aims

• To identify 25 unmissable picture books which every child should experience. 
• To introduce the idea that every story has a ‘beginning, middle and end’.
• To support children to ‘map out’ each of the Once Upon A Time stories so they can see how the story is structured. 

Intended Outcomes

• Every child in P1 will have experienced a rich array of ‘classic’ and new, high quality picture books. 
• Every child will understand that a story has a beginning, middle and an end. 
• Children will be able to listen to a story and recall what happened at the beginning, middle and end. 
• There will be an improvement in children’s ability to generate their own 3-part stories – assessed by ‘cold writing’ pieces throughout the year and compared to the baseline from the start of P1.

Methodology

The first stage was to identify the 25 books we wanted to use for the project. I was unable to find a suitable extant ‘top 25’ list so I eventually crowd-sourced my list by talking to fellow readers, fellow parents, fellow teachers, writers and illustrators.

The final list is as follows:

Where the Wild Things Are by  Maurice Sendak

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

Paddington by Michael Bond

Dogger by Shirley Hughes

Lucy and Tom at the Seaside by Shirley Hughes

I want my hat back by Jon Klassen

The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss

Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson

Ada Twist Scientist by Andrea Beaty

The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr

The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson

Not Now Bernard by David McKee

The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson

The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

A Bit Lost by Chris Haughton

Peepo by Janet and Alan Ahlberg

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen

Hairy McLary from Donaldsons Dairy by Lynley Dodd

Penguin by Polly Dunbar

Elmer by David McKee

Gorilla by Anthony Browne

Oi Frog by Kes Grey

Dragon Loves Penguin by Debi Gliori

The list is a starting point. We will definitely cover all of these books but the project can be extended to take in other titles which the children might express an interest in.

Each week we are reading one of the stories to our key group and we are asking them to think about the structure of the story as we read. Having heard the story the children think back and try to establish between them what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. We map out their ideas on a linear story planner on which we indicate that the far left of the line is the beginning and the far right is the end. Each time the child offers an idea about something that happened we indicate where abouts on the line that part of the story happened and we keep mapping until we establish a timeline of the narrative. We then read their version of the narrative back to them reinforcing the idea of the beginning the middle and the end.

 

In the 2 weeks since the start of the project we are already seeing a significant change in the children’s ability to identify the beginning, middle and end and I am excited to see how this understanding of structure feeds into their next ‘cold writing’ piece. Do follow me on twitter to keep up with the progress of the project.