100 books like Storytelling with Children

Mother Nature must be very grateful this handbook exists. Within its 368 pages is a treasury of time-tested stories, creative activities, and methods that environmental educators and storytellers can use to affect people’s pro-environmental behaviour. Its collection of 21 chapters share a myriad of ways to use storytelling for a greener world. Each chapter has a different author(s), bringing their perspective on environment, community, and learning through stories. They explore the links between storytelling and emotional literacy, place, environmental justice, connecting with alienated youngsters, how to encourage children and adults’ curiosity about nature, building community, sustainability, and indigenous peoples, local legends, human-animal communication, and how to co-create a sustainable future together.

This is a book for all who work with people – in other words, it is a book for everyone. It is full of inspiration and practical tools to bring transformation and healing into your daily life, wherever you are. During times of conflict, storytelling dedicated to peace and reconciliation has proven successful in creating a common ground between people of all ages, from different cultures and disparate world views.

The New Story includes more than 30 tales from around the world plus easy-to-do exercises, with contributions from six modern storytellers at work in places like Israel, Kurdistan, and Sierra Leone.

Birds of Heaven is a tiny book full of noble thoughts on why stories and storytelling are integral to our humanity. Okri, the Man Booker Prize author of ‘The Famished Road’, eloquently states ‘The universe began as a story… we are part human, part stories.’

The text contains two inspirational essays on the meaning of language and its power to shape our lives. The work presents an alternative spiritual response to the problems of the present day. It is bursting with beautiful and insightful gems.

Why do we tell stories? What power lies within storytelling? From the great myths and legends to enchanting fairy tales, parables, fables, and folk tales, stories can have a great healing and educative power. They come from our subconscious and imagination, deep inside us. They have much to teach us about ourselves and the world we create around us.

Described as a manual for ‘soul ecology’, in his book Kornberger first explores this ‘story power’, then explains how to apply it to help a child develop, or to heal and transform a child with difficulties. He then discusses the art and practicalities of creating new stories to help children with particular needs.

This is a valuable and inspiring book for teachers, parents, creative writers, and students of literature.

Matthew is a serial public speaking champion who basically should be entered in The Moth Hall of Fame asap. If you've never heard Matthew Dicks talk, pause this and go watch his videos online. He's that good. What I love about his book is that he shares how he crafts his own stories and shares some amazing tips on how to capture everyday events that can later on be turned into powerful stories. Although this book isn't so much geared towards business or work, I think everyone can learn a great deal from Matthew's impressive experience of making people pay attention and connect to what you say (both as a best-selling novelist, school teacher, and public speaking champion).

While we would love to think we are always rational, we are hard-wired for story not the rational data (albeit key data can be a strong anchor in a story). I started my career far more in the assumption of rational data trumps all, but recognised, through bumps and bruises, how stories can overtake decision-making. When I learned how to tell a better story, I learned how to get the results I needed. Gabrielle is such a down-to-earth, energising speaker and writer, and this book provided me with such a practical, relatable framework for always having a good story or two in my back pocket.  

It is exciting to encourage students to start telling stories too. This book had lots of good ideas that I use in my storytelling classes for children. Kids enjoyed activities like rolling a yarn ball back and forth across a circle as they add to a story. The book includes 25 easy-to-tell tales for student beginners. And I learned from watching the DVD Children Telling Stories: A Storytelling Unit in Action that was included.

I found that owning a collection of tales organized by these themes was very useful. Over 100 short folktales on themes of cooperation, courage, diversity, empathy, friendship, generosity, honesty and fairness, perseverance, respect, responsibility, self-control, and bullying prevention. Pearmain also gives suggestions for telling these and for extending them in the classroom. Wrapping an idea in a story really helps the concept sink in for the listener. Having a collection like this helped me build programs for use in the library.

Stories come alive when people tell them to each other.

In my mid-20s, I happened upon a weekly gathering in Toronto, “1001 Friday Nights of Storytelling.” In a former synagogue turned art school – with candlelight shining on works in progress – people told old tales, by heart and with heart. This was the beginning of many things in my life, and this is the community that folklorist Kay Stone has written about.

She shows that the Toronto storytelling circle is part of a worldwide movement. She talks with great storytellers and explores favourite stories with them. And she shares her own struggle with a witch story from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and how, as she told it again and again, she changed the story and the story changed her.

This book contains twelve easily told tales that can be used to discuss character development. The Norfolks include suggestions for classroom use of the tales. I like to recommend this to the teachers in my storytelling classes as the advice comes from a teacher who has written several other books on using stories in the classroom.