Story workshop started with a question embraced by teacher-researchers at Opal School, including me and my colleagues. We asked: What is the connection between literacy and the arts? Inspired and curious about the rich landscape we expected to find around this intersection, we asked more questions:
Story workshop allows teachers who lament the loss of the arts in the child’s school day to find a way to put them to use in new ways that work for everyone.
As schools are transitioning between virtual and in person instruction, story workshop is a powerful way to fuse social emotional learning, community building, and vigorous literacy instruction during a time when teachers are not going to be able to afford to compartmentalize those things. Children need to share their experiences, their emotional lives, and to find their way back to one another and to school, and story workshop is designed to joyfully facilitate that.
How Does Story Workshop Work?
Story Workshop is a structure and approach that supports language and literacy development in the preschool and primary grades. Adults work alongside children as they explore prepared environments and experiences and share stories. Together they wonder:
At Opal School, story workshop takes place four or five days a week and lasts up to ninety minutes. Teachers in other schools have developed their own rhythms of story workshop that work for them in their unique settings.
In every story workshop, adults invite children to imagine, write, edit, revise, publish, and share their stories. Prepared spaces and organized materials inspire and entice children to overflow with thoughts and ideas and memories and imagination. Materials like blocks, paint, water, sand, colored pencils, and loose-parts collage become the vehicles for the children’s stories and act as inspiration as they capture them on paper as increasingly skilled writers. Adults facilitate children to engage as a thought community, listening to one another’s stories and considering their influence on their lives and in their classroom. They construct meaning together as they make sense of the world they experience together.
What Are the Structures and Routines of Story Workshop?
There are five elements that make up the structure of story workshop:
A teacher for 25 years, Susan Harris MacKay most recently served as Pedagogical Director at Opal School in Portland, Oregon, where the idea of story workshop began in her classroom. As a national speaker, she has inspired thousands of teachers to expand their use of play, the arts, and inquiry to support children’s rights to high quality educational environments upon which our democracy depends.