The National Preschool Teachers’ Storytelling Competition was
held this afternoon at the Bliss Center in Belize City. The event is designed
to help teachers of young students to hone their skill in that fine art of story-telling.
The stories must be original, they must incorporate dramatic elements and most
importantly, they must capture the attention and imagination of the young children
who hear it. Here are the teachers who did all that.
[Winning Story
“A lesson for Lindy. Lindy was little girl who loved to eat unhealthy
food. She would eat ice cream for breakfast, chips with kool-aid for dinner,
and biscuit and coke for supper. Everyday Lindy would go to school. She would
not keep still. She would jump around. Her teeth decayed and began falling out.
Lindy became very sick. Lindy said I will never eat unhealthy food again and
I will eat the healthy food from the six food groups so I can be healthy and
strength.”]
Guadalupe Beak, Winner
“The teachers worked together with the stories, we try to bring at
the level, at the preschool level, we try to put ourselves, our imagination
at a child level. We already know, we try to keep the time of the story because
they gave us a time limit and we tried to get through with the story and with
not too many contradictions so it could get across to the children at their
level.”
Leroy Green, Coordinator
“Story telling is one of the tools which pre-school teachers use everyday
in the classrooms and they need to understand that there is a difference between
story reading and story telling. Story reading is when you stand in front of
the children and read a book. And we all know that does not impress three or
four year olds at all to see a teacher standing there reading from a book with
their heads buried down in the book. So as versus that, storytelling now is
when you memorize the story and you dramatize it using costumes, props, music,
and whatever you need to hold the interest of the preschool children because
storytelling as I said before is one of the main vehicles that preschool teachers
use to teach different concepts in whatever lesson they are teaching.
At that age that’s when the brain is starting to develop intellect
and that’s when we can inspire creativity and all the rest that goes along
with learning in the young child and really cause them to get interested in
school. A lot of time we notice that somewhere along the line they get bored
and if I may so without offending people, because a lot of times I look around
in the primary schools and the methods that they use are so boring that children
are no longer interested. They come out of preschool where they get a lot of
storytelling and drama and what not and then when they get to primary school
that no longer takes place.”
The first place finisher won $250 and a trophy.
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