“Share Stories Open Minds”, is one of those unique projects, that has brought together a diverse variety of people who have nothing in common but an urge to tell stories. This project has helped them to direct their energies towards a positive direction. We believe a collective effort on the part of all these storytellers can and will change the lives of the children listening to these stories. All the people involved in this project have contributed wholeheartedly in terms of stories, ideas and sharing individual experiences. Our monthly meetings serve the purpose of a brainstorming session where we contribute ideas so that others may benefit from it and we get ideas from others to incorporate in our storytelling efforts thereby making it more dynamic.

This is a list of all the methods and devices that we have come up with so far :

1) Many of the volunteers have suggested the use of visual images to assist their stories and to attract the attention of the children. The children have responded well to stories where they were shown pictures along with the stories. My personal experience with the children at Disha foundation reinforces this idea. The children tend to get easily distracted if a story is told to them straight away, but when they are shown pictures of the story in action they seem to be more interested and are more responsive.

2) Usage of theatrics is an old storytelling device. The moment you use theatrics while reading literature you grab attention, and children are no exception. Their interest in the actions that assist the story helps us keep their interest.

3) Atreyee Dey came up with the brilliant idea of telling stories through songs. Many of us have heard them as kids and she took the initiative to tell the children a story through a song. This initiative was well appreciated and we’d like the other volunteers to inform us about songs that could be of use to us.

4) Another idea that came up, was to use the names of the children in the groups instead of names from the stories. This way the children would feel involved in the stories themselves, as they would identify with the characters.

5) Another tool that has been adopted by most of the centres already is alloting time to the children to tell stories that they have heard or experienced. under this system many of the children have been observed to make up stories on spot. We have started helping these children to nurture their creative abilities. This is probably the part that children look forward to the most.

So far we have been doing quite well and the project has been a success. The centres are being run very well by our dedicated group of volunteers all of whom are extremely sincere about their work. I welcome comments suggesting other storytelling devices that we could use in our attempt to brighten these children’s lives by telling them stories they will probably remember their entire lifetime.