Bournemouth Theatre - The Way Through The Forest

Exploring Emotional Literacy through Early Years Drama

In 2007 Bournemouth Theatre in Education were involved in a 3 phase partnership project with Bournemouth Borough Council's Early Years team. This involved 16 visits to 8 different EY settings in Bournemouth over 3 months.

The first involved one of us working in role with the children on a drama based on Eric Carle's ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar' and making a contract with staff to encourage children to play together in more creative and open-ended ways.

The second visit started with three of us from BTiE performing a short inter-active play about playing - alone and with a friend. Though humorous, this tapped into the problems our egos can cause us and explored how hard it can be to tell what people are feeling. Lily, a girl of 4, takes her friend Sara upstairs to play in her Granddad's house. But Sara looks sad and doesn't want to play. Why? Has she got a tummy ache? No. Is she feeling thirsty? No. What then? Lily wants to know! And she is a bit too boisterous, which just makes Sara more upset! So Grand-dad asks the children in the audience to show Lily how to be gentle with your friends and how to cheer them up when they are sad. It works! Sara then reveals she's sad because she's lost her toy Froggie! Lily and her favourite cuddly toy Crow fly to the rescue - she's seen the frog downstairs on the sideboard. All is well and they make up their own story together about an exciting walk home through the woods to the pond, where Froggie jumps in with a great big splash! And everyone joins in, swimming under a giant ‘watery' multi-coloured parachute.

After a break for refreshments, we asked if any of the children would like to tell their own story to one of us about how one of their own cuddly toys was feeling. We were surprised and delighted with how many wanted to do so, hopefully inspired by the play but also by their own imagination. We used an ‘open questioning' technique for this, which involved finding a safe and comfy space, then asking each individually a series of structured story probes and writing down their ideas as they dictated them. We then read their emerging story back to them to check it was as they wished. Later in the session, we made a circle and acted out the stories, with the ‘author' having first choice on whether to play his or her character and the recruiting other actors from the remaining children.

We based this method on that described by the American Early Years practitioner, Vivian Gussin Paley, whose books reflecting her passionate use of story-making with children over many years, such as The Boy Who Would be a Helicopter should be essential reading for everybody working in Early Years - indeed at any age!

The final phase of the project was a conference including practitioners from all the settings who'd hosted the BTiE input. It was fascinating to find out how many of them had continued to use the story-making technique with their children after we had gone. Those who'd really taken the technique on board gave moving testimonies to the power of creativity to inspire and motivate even the youngest and most disadvantaged learners. One particular case stayed with me - involving a boy from a dysfunctional family, who had found a way to communicate through story some of the confusion he was feeling in his young home life.

At the end of the project, we gathered all the stories up, along with illustrations added by the children, and began the process of making a new book of stories by Early Years children in Bournemouth, called ‘The Way Through the Forest', which has just been published by Bournemouth Borough Council. As the title suggests, nearly all the stories are about emotional literacy - what different feelings we have, good ones, bad ones, happy ones, sad ones. All of them acknowledge the wonderful, healing power of the imagination.

We hope practitioners will now feel inspired to use the children's stories as stimulii for other children, nurturing their own natural creative instincts. Meanwhile, Bournemouth theatre in Education is about to begin a new Early Years partnership project with Bournemouth LA, exploring creative ways of using picture books to develop children's thinking and language skills. This approach goes way beyond just ‘acting out the story' of the book. Rather, it enables children be active listeners, to ask questions and use their imagination to find solutions to problems.

Tony Horitz
Independent Theatre Practitioner
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