Story telling

I haven’t posted on this blog for a couple of months now, so it’s time I started again. The reason for this gap is that I spent Christmas helping one of my daughters, Julia, move home. She was in a flat with other people who just wanted to party, but she had to get up early in the mornings to go to work in the hospital and she didn’t appreciated being kept awake at 3 am.
Then in the middle of January I moved to New Zealand. It’s a lovely country and I’m looking forward to the start of the school year, and getting back into the classroom to teach maths.
As a result of these diversions, I’m afraid that the blog went by the board.

Nevertheless back to business.

Storytelling is integral to human beings. We have evolved to learn from stories. Once this was a matter of survival, the way that the human animal discovered that things were good or dangerous without having to experiment for themselves.

In recent years, since the widespread availability of recorded video, pupil studying English literature have spend ever more time watching the plays they study rather than reading the script. Why, because its simply easier to remember the story and the dialogue from experiencing the story than from reading the script. I myself was at one time an expert in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV (part 2) because when school enacted it, I was on stage for just over half of the production... I played a dead body, but that was good as it allowed me to relax and be a spectator of the play. Without effort I learnt everybody’s part. When my children were young, they loved nothing more than watching Disney videos over and over again. They knew them word perfect as well. They learnt it all without effort. That is why, at Puppet Maths, we dramatise maths. We put maths in the context of a story, and enact that story for children to enjoy. As a by product children learn to do maths without fear and without effort.