Event Ideas
Host Read Across America Storypalooza
Celebrate story and grow a storytelling community by hosting a Read Across America Storypalooza storytelling event! Think of your event like a storytelling concert and your performers are the students, families, and special guests who share tales that are important to them or stories of their own creation. Choose a theme and let the storytelling begin!
Showcase stories in a variety of ways at your Storypalooza:
- Storytelling performance by a professional storyteller or a community member
- Reader’s Theater featuring students, staff, special guests, or family members
- Screening of digital stories and recorded oral histories
- Virtual guest storytellers
- Performances of spoken word poems or songs
Offer storytelling resources or a storytelling workshop as a prelude to your Storypalooza:
Set Up a Story Kiosk
As part of your Read Across America celebration, or as year-round resource, create a space where educators, students, families, and others in your community can share and record their own stories. A story recording booth can be as simple as setting up a laptop or smartphone in a quiet space or you can develop something more elaborate. Check if your local library or a nearby college or museum can loan audio and visual equipment for an event or see if there’s a closet or other space in your school or library you can dedicate long term to recording and editing stories. There are also a variety of web tools and apps to help record and store stories.
At your Read Across America event, help storytellers get started by providing 3-5 prompts at your recording booth and ask for a story about:
- a book that impacted you
- a book or story that is important to you
- a person or a story that got you into reading
- someone who changed your life by sharing a book or story
- a person who introduced you to the joys of books and reading
- a time when you heard a story that changed you or helped you make a change
- the way books have affected your life and family
Include signage to welcome and encourage many types of stories: real-life or made-up stories, songs, poetry, spoken word, interviews, etc. Also have writing materials for storytellers to outline and plan the story they want to share.
Your story kiosk could also include spaces and technology for participants to listen to or watch someone else’s story.
Story Circles
Get kids and community members together to tell stories and to listen to the stories of others! For a more laid-back event, host a Story Circle. A Story Circle event can be big or small, with one story circle of 20 or fewer people or lots of different story circles to accommodate a larger group. Story circles are about listening just as much as they are about telling stories, so you’ll also need a facilitator to help each circle stay focused on the chosen or provided theme and allow for silences, thought, and reflection.
Start your Story Circle event with an activity everyone participates in and that relates to your theme. It could be a special read aloud, a musical performance and sing along, and/or some refreshments. Then organize groups and have them gather to share their stories from their own experiences and imaginations.
Weather permitting, Story Circles work well outdoors. You can also adapt Story Circles into a virtual event, with breakout rooms serving as your circles. These resources can help you organize your Story Circle event:
Organize a Story Tour
Give students an opportunity to talk about their feelings about their school and community and share their experiences and ideas. Have students create their own stories around local landmarks in your school or community and invite guests to come hear their tales performed on the very spot where they take place! Location-based stories can be the hidden history of a place, connected to personal narratives, or made-up stories that incorporate the site. This on-the-scene storytelling can be delivered as a walking tour with a small group or plan to station students (and a supportive adult) at each location and provide the audience with a map of where to find each storyteller.
A Story Tour can also be an event for kids, with adult storytellers stationed at different real or imagined locations, such as a classroom that’s now a cave or a playground that’s been transformed into a space station. The stories shared help kids experience the location and hopefully inspire them to read more about the place or create stories of their own.
