St. Paul’s Nursery – storyboxes

As part of the York Stories 2012 Initiative, Telling Arts were eager for the stories of young people to be captured, rather than simply the nostalgic recollections of older residents. Children can make the everyday stories, that we don’t necessarily think to tell, sound exciting. They are less concerned with the pressure of story structure or of entertaining their audience but rather they can give an honest snapshot of life for young people in York in the present day. They also have an exciting tendancy to expand on tales and turn them into something fantastical. We believed that the way they do this helps to show how the imaginations of 2012 are working and this is as valuable to be recorded for posterity as the historical recollections of older residents. The challenge of how to capture such stories was taken on by Telling Arts with the support of St. Paul’s Nursery. We led storycatching training sessions where we shared ideas with other EYFS practitioners from the York area. We then encouraged the children to collect “storyboxes” with their parents of their experiences outside of their childcare settings to then share within those settings. These boxes could contain anything from photographs, leaflets, drawings, items of significance to the teller such as leaves, materials, basically anything to help to recall their stories. The added benefit of improving communication between home and childcare settings, as well as develping the communication skills of the young people in general, was a bonus to this project. Telling Arts then returned to the nursery and recorded each child talking about the items that they had collected in their storyboxes and the relevence of them. The storyboxes, many of which were decorated to a high standard (including an elabourate design of the Minster!), were then displayed alongside edited accounts by the children of the stories their contents inspired.