You can now purchase a day of Training and Storytelling online, find out more and book.

In January 2007 we began touring the UK with our Story-Go-Round project, aiming to train library staff and bring them together with special schools. Through this, we hoped to leave a local legacy of multi-sensory storytelling and inclusion of youngsters with profound and complex needs. Region by region, we matched special schools with libraries, demonstrated multi-sensory storytelling with local children, trained library staff, and followed up with story-packs and additional support.

Whilst a popular introduction to multi-sensory books and storytelling, we found that the 90 minutes of training built into the Story-Go-Round project often left behind enthusiastic librarians lacking the confidence to interact with people with Severe or Profound & Multiple Learning Disabilities. Thanks to funding from The Big Lottery Fund, our Telling Tales project got under way in the Autumn Term of 2009 aiming to address this problem by mentoring the librarians at six storytelling sessions throughout the year.

The first session simply gave the librarians the chance to observe a trained storyteller using Bag Books for a storytelling session with children from a local Special School. As the sessions went on, the librarians did increasingly more of the storytelling themselves, until they were confident enough to arrange and run the sessions themselves once the project had finished.

In the first year, the project covered four regions of England but in the second year it expanded to the rest of England.

Comments from the Librarians included:
“I am picking up the text of the stories and also the techniques involved in the multi-sensory storytelling. Well done and thank you - invaluable training.”
“Wow, I’m really encouraged by the children’s response to my storytelling. It was interesting to see how the repetition built up their anticipation and enjoyment of the storytelling.”
“I enjoyed the storytelling session today. It will help me to deliver the stories on future dates when going out to nurseries and pre-schools and with groups coming to the library.”

In the photograph above, a librarian practices their multi-sensory storytelling at Chippenham Library. The story being told is “Gran’s Visit”, one of our oldest stories and last year’s best-seller. Here the letterbox rattles and a letter arrives from Gran saying she’s coming to stay.