Classroom Management & Storytelling with Kathryn Froelich

I’m going to go back to Missouri River education cooperative this role that I play now is cultural coordinator has given me the opportunity now to go into the classroom and support the work that the culture language teachers are doing and so we try to incorporate some of the traditional methods and one of the very first ones is storytelling it’s so important the benefits of storytelling you know so when we’ve gone into that when I’ve got into the classroom and shared some of my Arikara stories that I was told by my grandmother it’s amazing how the children listen and they’re so intent and of course you have to be a little Adam eight animated you know so I was telling some of the teachers yesterday that when it comes to culture and language I have not yet had a student be disrespectful or a management issue a classroom management issue has never developed when it’s something related to culture and language and especially in the area of storytelling so that’s the mrec has enabled us to go into the schools and really reinforce the traditional methods so another area is recently at Standing Rock elementary school we brought in Joseph Peru Shack and he’s a well-known children’s author from New York and he went from classroom to classroom and that’s all he did was play the flute and tell stories and the children were just wonderful and they were just in awe they loved him one little girl when he came out of the lunch room she ran up to him and you could just tell she wanted to hang on to his leg or hang on to his arm or something he just you know so but even more recently Kerry Ziegler is another co-worker that I work with and she’s trained in the star lab and so we were able to use a star lab and go into our schools and bring the students rotate the students k through 12 through the star lab and every session we started out with a story and the one that we started out with at Standing Rock was a story about the Seven Sisters and so what you’ll get in there it’s just the conditions in the star lab are so great for telling stories because there’s just a little light on the projector and then you see this huge open area with stars and the kids sit in a circle and then your ice it and you can hear exit I mean even though i have a soft voice everybody could hear me and so I told him that story and then that was the motivation and that engaged the kids to want to know about okay well what’s another name how did the Greeks view the Seven Sisters what was the name for it and so and Carrie knew all of that so it was a wonderful way to do that and then we also did surveys in and that was something that came up time and time again was the kids said we loved the story you know I learned so much about the Lakotas story you know and so that was I think that’s storytelling so important and in this tricksters for a Ricker oh the coyote is a trickster so there’s lessons to learn so storytelling can be historical it can be for humor it can be just for entertainment it can be for lessons and the ones that I usually try to share with the kids are for lessons I think we need more that our kids are so now they’re digital natives and I think that helps it’s very calming and it requires that they use other senses like their ears and they have to create the images in their mind you know so I think I think that’s something we need to get back to we’ve kind of lost that