Story Vine, The

by Anne Pellowski, Lynn Sweat

These stories, collected from around the world, require the use of such devices as strings, vines, dolls, and pictures and are accompanied by easy-to-follow instructions for adults telling the stories

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

First published April 1, 1984

Reviews

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong]

I really wish I had this book as a resource when I was teaching music to grade schoolers. This book gives the history of telling stories around the world through song and other props such as string, drawing in the sand, drawing figures that turn into other figures and even nesting dolls.

[Richard Thompson]

This is a strange book to choose categories for — it is a resource book and is, in that sense, a non-fiction book, but it is a collection of folktales and those are works of fiction...

I read this book years ago when we were active in the Prince George Storyteller's Roundtable, and two elements of the book ended up leading me in new directions as a writer and storyteller: I was fascinated by the idea of telling sand stories for larger audiences by using a "sand story box" on an overhead projector; and the concept of a story vine as a "table of contents" for one's stories was the inspiration for my one novel for young readers, the source of the idea for my own story vine which I used to good effect in my presentations, and the inspiration for the name of my nursery school.

[Matt Youngbauer]

Great sourcebook for storytelling ideas. Has some of the common string and paper folding stories ("mosquito," "captain's shirt") but also less common ideas as well. Nesting dolls, sand drawing, thumb piano; I've never seen anyone use these but I bet it would be enchanting. As a magician and writer, I know how difficult it can be to convey complicated hand positioning instructions; the directions for the stories are generally clear here and a good place to get started. I know this is a book I'll be coming back to again and again.

[Erin]

With Covid and social distancing, I’m looking for more storytelling resources I can use at a distance and not risk kids being unable to see. Unfortunately, these all seem to use drawing techniques, string, and small hand movements that won’t translate to that format.

[Toby]

After hearing Anne Pellowski share stories with handkerchiefs, string & drawing paper, I was interested to read this book. Offering step-by-step instructions should the reader want to duplicate the stories in a classroom, the book changed my thinking about what a story is: something that is interesting & entertaining and also meaningful to the teller, 'a letter that comes to us from yesterday' (Jane Yolen), bits and pieces to introduce another culture, education as well as entertainment + a reminder that we are all storytellers, whether we embrace that identity or not.

[Shoshana G]

I'm not sure how useful most of these suggestions will be in my personal practice, but I'm definitely going to look more into the picture stories in particular. I also think matruyshka dolls could work well with out audience. I don't think I'd be able to learn string stories from a book, but I'll definitely look into youtube videos to see if I can learn some of the simpler ones!

[Tracey]

nonfiction: storytelling with props (string stories, picture stories including sand stories, finger stories, stories with dolls, African riddles, and 2 stories that can be told with an African thumb piano/kalimba/sanza/mbira).

[Kelly]

Has several stories that might be fun to do on school visits or with older children. It has string stories, drawing stories and stories that use musical instruments.

[Paul Groos]

This book has very, very basic stories, suitable for small children in small audiences. It was inspiring to read about telling stories with strings, drawings or musical instruments. Some nice ideas. But explaining how to tie string figures in words and very simple pictures is almost impossible. This was the same for explanations on sand figures and some of the drawings. Hard to understand and almost impossible to replicate. So this book was a nice piece of inspiration, but other than that unfortunately quite useless to me.