Magical Rain

First Colors

Keeping the Story Alive
Did you know that a story, like the story of the First Colors, can disapear? Did you know that stories can become lost and forgotten? When a story gets lost and forgotten, it disapears, and in a way, you could say that it dies. On the other hand, there is a way that we can keep stories alive, so that they will be there for us, in case we need them in the future.....

 

The way we can keep stories alive is by sharing them and telling them! If we stop telling a story, we may forget it. If we keep telling a story, it will be remembered. When we remember a whole story, this is called learning a story by heart. If we tell a story to someone else, we are giving them the story, so they can hold the story in their hearts. The wonderful thing about stories though, is that when we give them away, we get to keep them even more. When you tell a story, you have to call upon you memory, and ask your memory to work for you. Your memory is like a muscle, and the more it works, the stronger it gets. When your memory works on telling a story, that memory of the story gets stronger, and then you are sure to keep that story in your heart. If you liked the story of the First Colors, we would like you to help keep the story of the First Colors alive. You can do this by telling the story to people who do not know it yet, such as parents or friends who were not there to see the show. You can also talk with your teachers and friends at school about the parts of the story you remember the best, in order to keep the story fresh and alive in you. The first step to understanding a story is remembering it, telling it, and learning it by heart.
 
Teacher's Notes

 

Lesson: Remembering the Story

Facilitate a group retelling of the story by the students in your classroom. The students will spontaneously start throwing out what they remember of the story (often out of sequence, in their excitement). Rather than assuming that one particular student will know the whole story the best (or that you remember it in its entirety yourself) it is best to allow the group as a whole to recall the story. This is in fact what we do at Magical Rain Theaterworks when we are preparing for a show. We each know the story by heart, but before a show we will run through the sequence, with all three of us (Ike, Dan and Benito) reminding each other, in a back and forth conversation, of particular parts and details. If you do have a particular student who seems to know the whole thing and is starting to rattle it off all at once, find a good stopping point in the story and say "Stop", and then call on someone else to tell the next part (so the group develops the practice of remembering and sharing their knowledge). If there are disagreements on what happens next, have the students discuss it and arrive at their best consensus.

Objectives:

1.

To rekindle the interest of the students in the story, and to help them recall what we call the "stepping stones" of the story (the "bones" or skeletal structure of the story, the "landmarks" that help us remember the story's path or through line).
2. To give the students practice with memorization, recall and group discussion and consensus building.
3. To lay the groundwork for future cultural lessons on the oral transmission of knowledge and stories by the Aztecs and other native peoples of ancient Mexico.