Kamishibai

Pre-schoolers Explore Stories Through Kamishibai

At the West Bee Nursery School in Brattleboro VT, three, four and five year olds had the opportunity to enjoy Japanese kamishibai stories and a variety of story extensions activities.  From January through March of '09, Dianne made seven visits to West Bee Nursery School. 

To the left, Dianne is introducing the kamishibai theater to the children on her first visit to the preschool.  Each visit included the presentation of two kamishibai stories, a familiar and a new story.  The first story Dianne introduced was The Little Chick.  After a movement activity that included walking tall like the chick and pouncing like the cat, the children each made a little chick puppet.  The puppets were used later for a "Chick Puppet Parade", both as part of story play and for the parent "Kamishibai Party" at the end of the residency.  Fine motor development, attention to directions, and story discussion were all a part of the puppet making.

For young children, attending to a story as a group, and experiencing the story in a group, is an important part of language and literacy development as well as social and emotional development.  Kamishibai are so visually compelling, and lend themselves so well to dramatic retellings, that it is easy for children to attend to the stories with completely absorbed and engaged attention.

  

An important literacy goal for the West Bee Nursery School residency was for each child to create their own kamishibai story.  At the preschool, this was approached by introducing the children to a fun and highly patterned kamishibai called Grow, Grow, Grow, as Big as You Can!  Each child created a three page miniature kamishibai, based on an object of their choosing that would grow in their short kamishibai.

Titles created at West Bee by the children include My Race Car, The Rainbow Hotel, and Sleeping Beauty and her Pup.  These stories were read to the class by their preschool teachers over the winter, and were presented to the families during the "Kamishibai Party".

Another important, and very fun, part of the kamishibai residency program was for children to re-enact the kamishibai stories.  Children took turns being audience members and having character roles for these re-enactments.

To the left, the children act out The Kitten, a simple and beautful kamishibai illustrated by Kyoko Watanabe.  Dianne hand holds the kamishibai while tying their play into the story text.  Above, children laugh as players act out a section of an old Japanese folktale called Issunboshi, the One Inch Boy.

Of course, an equally fun story extension to Issunboshi was when the children made their own magic mallets.  A magic mallet had transformed life for Issunboshi and the princess-  so having a magic mallet of their own seemed like a pretty good idea to the preschoolers at West Bee.

Many stories came alive at West Bee Nursery School this winter.  Dianne would like to thank director Moriah Oldham, teacher Wendy Cristofolini, and assistant teacher Miss Diane for their commitment to the project.  Also, many thanks to the United Way of Windham County for their generous support of the project.

Kamishibai Educators' Workshop at the Mariposa Museum

On Monday April 13 '09, a second workshop for educators was held at the Mariposa Museum in Peterborough, NH.  The first in the series was held on March 9th. 

Teachers and librarians in the CONVAL School District were invited to participate in the workshops, which introduced kamishibai as a storytelling art and explored ways of helping students create their own kamishibai.

The Mariposa Musuem has a storytelling theater and a number of kamishibai as part of their collection.  The kamishibai are used to further the Mariposa's mission of providing a community gathering place for all ages to celebrate international folk art.

Teachers had the opportunity to veiw kamishibai made by Dianne's students over the past six years.  The kamishibai were made by children from kindergarten to the fourth grade.

On the right, a teacher explores how a kamishibai theater works.

Educators at the workshop had many wonderful questions about how to integrate the story telling and the story making into their curriculum.

Dianne shared with workshop participants the variety of steps she uses to teach students to make their own kamishibai, from the initial gathering of story ideas to the finishing touch of the three places the kamishibai title and author/artist name needs to appear.

She described how using storyboards allows students to move back and forth between pictures and words as they create their kamishibai.  Also, because kamishibai is a performance art, she touched on the importance of providing students time to learn how to perform their finished kamishibai for a live audience.

  

 

To the right, Jeannie Connolly, the Arts Enrichment Coordinator for the CONVAL School District, performs a kamishibai recently created by a first grade class at the Hancock Elementary School in Hancock, NH.  Kamishibai created at Hancock Elementary will be performed at the 16th Annual "Children in the Arts Festival", in Peterborough on Saturday May 16, '09.  See www.childrenandthearts.org for more details. 

Workshop feedback from one teacher: "I love the idea of incorporating art, storytelling, mapping and literacy elements to help teach writing skills."

And from another teacher: "Keep spreading the Kamishibai Way!" 

Pictures and Words

In a kamishibai, the story is told to the audience with equal emphasis on pictures and words, because the audience sees the pictures throughout the story's performance.  So when children begin the planning for their own kamishiabi, they move back and forth between pictures and words.

In my current work with fourth graders as a artist-in-residency teacher, as well as with second graders in Brattleboro's Elementary Enrichment Program, students are creating original stories using a specific planning process.  Here we can see storyboards the children are using for the dual planning of their text and images.

I see a variety of approaches to this part of the project among students.  Some write the first panel's text and make a matching illustration right away, linking words and images throughout their creation process.  Some students write the entire story, and then return to illustrate it.  More rarely, a student will create the story's entire sequence of pictures without any text at all, and then writes the words to accompany the visual story.  This flexibilty of approach, as well as the availablity of choice for the young story-maker, seems to be an important part of the success and pleasure students experience when making their own kamishibai.

 

Storytelling in Wilmington, Vermont

The most important part of The Kamishibai Project is its central feature- storytelling.  Storytelling is an art which brings people together.  The storyteller and her audience are sharing a space where meaning is created in a community setting.  The community can be an audience at a public library, in a middle school or elementary school, or a Family Night for celebrating the stories created by children.  For the brief period in time when the audience gathers to hear and see a kamishibai, they are joined in a common literacy and cultural experience.

This year's fourth grade in Wilmington Vermont, shown below, is such an audience.

For these children, making kamishibai in school is part of their social studies curriculum.  The Japanese kamishibai they are hearing are retellings of traditional Japanese folktales.  One student asks, "Why are there so many ogres in kamishibai?"  Oni- also known as ogres- had been featured in each of the kamishibai the class has heard over our storytelling and writing sessions.  I ask the fourth graders "Do we have ogres that appear in stories we're familiar with?"  "There's Shrek!"  replies one student.  "And the ogre in "The Three Billy Goats Gruff!'", says another student.  "No, that was a troll" objects someone.  "True", I moderate, "but the troll served the same function as the ogre in Issunboshi or in Momotaro." 

Here, storytelling is creating a vehicle for students to discuss cultural parallels between familiar Western folktales, some even dressed in modern movie garb like "Shrek", and the Japanese folktales they are learning about through kamishibai.