Trisha Lee - Princesses, Dragons and Helicopter Stories: Storytelling and Story Acting in the Early Years

Trisha Lee plays a magical role in classrooms all over the world. With only pen, paper and masking tape in hand, she can turn any group of children into an acting company. The children become storytellers, actors, and audience, and their teachers emerge as scribes, narrators and stage managers: the classroom is transformed into the make-believe worlds that children love best.

For those of us who worry that technology is stealing away the magic of childhood, Ms. Lees captivating and instructive book will bring relief and pleasure. She shows us that it is still the childrens own imaginations that unlock their unique identities and poetic natures. The words come from the children, and every expression grows in meaning and richness when reimagined inside a script and acted out with classmates. The power of fantasy to enhance language and build community is inescapable. Trisha Lee takes us through the process, step by step, with skill and enthusiasm.

We humans are born knowing how to place our thoughts and images into stories. Even the shyest three-year-old is eager to dictate a story if it will be acted out in the company of classmates. How fortunate that an early childhood classroom is populated by such a variety of characters, enough different types to satisfy all our dreams. Our superheroes and baby bears, our mommies, dinosaurs and runaway kittens are just waiting to be invited to step on to the stage.

The child says, in effect: If you let me pretend to be what I want to be while everyone watches and listens to me, I will give you my story and listen to yours. To which the teacher adds: If you and your classmates will act out your stories together, we will help one another reveal who we are and who we want to become, in a kinder, more generous and thoughtful classroom community.

And yet, havent our pretend superheroes been rescuing mommies and baby bears from monsters all along, and without the teachers help? Is it really so different when these developing plots and characters are dictated, written down and acted out on a space marked off with masking tape? This is one of the many questions answered for us in Princesses, Dragons and Helicopter Stories while we are being entertained and inspired.

Trisha Lee is a persuasive dramatist. Her admiration and respect for the lyrical imagina tions of her young storytellers and actors make me want to return to a kindergarten classroom and take my place once again in the theatre of the young.

Vivian Gussin Paley
Chicago, Illinois

Vivian Gussin Paley is a retired kindergarten teacher from the University of Chicago Laboratory School. She has published numerous books about her work. In 1989 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, in 1987 the Erikson Award for Service to Children, in 1998 a Lifetime Achievement American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the John Dewey Societys Outstanding Achievement Award in 2000. In 2004, she was named Outstanding Educator by the National Council of Teachers of English.

For more than 15 years Trisha Lee has worked with Vivian Gussin Paleys Storytelling and Story Acting curriculum. Through MakeBelieve Arts, she and her colleague Isla Hill have designed a programme of professional development based upon this approach.

This has come to be known as Helicopter Stories.

In 2013 Helicopter Stories was evaluated by the Open University. Since that time MakeBelieve Arts has established Centres of Excellence across the UK and offers Helicopter Starter and Helicopter Practitioner training.

In the pages that follow, Trisha Lee explores how stories and fantasy play engage all young children and help them to draw connections and make sense of the world.