Storytelling with Children

Telling stories awakens wonder and creates special occasions with children, whether it is bedtime, around the fire or on rainy days. Encouraging you to spin golden tales, Nancy Mellon shows how you can become a confident storyteller and enrich your family with the power of story.

Children love family storytelling and parents can learn this practical, magical art. Here are methods, tips and resources to enable you to:

• Create a listening space
• Use the day's events and rhythms to make stories
• Transform old stories and make up new ones
• Bring your personal and family stories to life
• Learn stories by heart using pictures, inner theatre, walk-about, singing the story and other methods
• Find the tale you want from Nancy's rich story-cupboard.

"Let Nancy Mellon teach you to be a storyteller and a discoverer, for you and your children, of worlds that truly make a difference."

Thomas Moore, Foreword

"Nancy Mellon continues to be an inspiration for storytellers old and new. Her experience, advice and suggestions work wonders. They are potent seeds that give you the creative confidence to find your own style of storytelling."

Ashley Ramsden, Director of the School of Storytelling, Emerson College

"Sensitive suggestions, gentle advice and sage insights, this is a story cupboard to feed imagination and heart. From it parents will know that they are the storytellers to give their children present delight, a lifetime's inner nourishment, a family core of confident knowing."

David Campbell, Poet, Broadcaster and Scottish Storyteller

"No longer will children be dependent on television and movies for stories. They will hear them told in the shelter of their families as they always have through the millennia."

Joan Almon, Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America

"Here's a treasure trove for professionals and rank beginners - a book borne of years of hands-on experience with parents and children, written from the heart and stirring to the soul. Reading it, I feel the urge to pull my own two children close, to light a candle, to begin ... Nancy Mellon inspires us all to be storytellers."

Katrina Kenison, author of Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry

"Nancy Mellon's Storytelling with Children is a wise and beautiful book. It is a gift to parents and to all who love imagination. Mellon reminds us we all have the magic of story within us. If we use that gift, we bring the beauty of language, rhythm and story to our children, to our listeners."

Jay O'Callaghan, author and storyteller