Storytelling Narratives: Our Story.

I have been reading this book book on story narratives and found it really helpful and inspiring. The principle is building in story into our lives to help children piece together their story and to re-build some of the broken pieces and bring healing through the powerful medium of story telling.

I have done some stories with PJ around the theme of when you were a tiny baby, I would have held you like this and we have role played with her baby dolls, feeding and done nappy changes and had hours of inter-mingling the feeding of dolls to regressing to feeding PJ too, with a piece by piece approach to re-building her understanding of love and care and meeting her needs as well as modelling how to care for others through play.

We have told and re-told the pieces of the jigsaw of how she came to be in foster care and how she then has come to me and she has loved telling and re-telling her story. This is her story and it is our story of how we found each other. She will soon have her Life Story Book as well, that will help add to these narratives, we are beginning to tell with a frequency and familiarity that they will be great traditional family stories.

PJ came to me with a story narrative that her social worker had given her about a family of bears who lived in the woods, where her social worker is the giraffe who was worried about the little bears and how they didn't have enough food and were sometimes frightened and how the giraffe took the little bears to live with some other animals who would be their foster carers while the giraffe searched all over the woods to find a new Mummy animal who would look after the bears forever and love them and care for them and to keep them safe.
This story was read to her during the transition of her being prepared to meet me for Introductions. The social worker had also used a family of animals to help
I have tried to tell this story, printed on the laminated sheets of paper with pictures but it has been flung across the room.
I have stuck to telling our story, together, for these last few months, without using the family of bears book, successfully until a few weeks ago.
I now have the set of animals passed on to me by PJ's social worker and we are beginning to use them with a renewed fascination. I am not using the laminated sheets at all and am just using the figures, which is working really well.

The Family of Bears in the woods.....

 

The Giraffe, who is the social worker who was in charge of all the babies and children in the woods...

 

the Giraffe was very worried about the little bears so she found other kind animals in the woods, foster carers, to take good care of little bear whilst she searched through all the woods for a new Mummy for little bear.

 

I now need to bring the bears family in the woods to it's conclusion with the introduction of what animal I will be?

I think this:

and of course, little bear and Mummy Elephant were very happy together and little bear had nice food and lots of fun with her new Mummy. And she was safe.

Do you do any story narratives with your children?