Children’s Storytelling Festival, presented by the Ottawa Storytellers (OST) on November 22 through 27, is a free, remote event that brings together family and community to celebrate the art of oral storytelling.
Zoom classrooms. Social media. Skype meetings. Remote offices. Everywhere we turn, there is a screen. Under the pandemic, confined to our own homes, our computers and TVs became our only window to the outside world, our only connection to our greater community. Yet, it’s one thing to passively watch the world, and another to actively engage within it.
At the Children’s Storytelling Festival, expert storytellers from Indigenous, English-speaking, and French-speaking communities will gather to tell a variety of stories aimed for children aged 3 through 11, each showcasing their talent for creating and curating worlds through pure language.
Through expressive words and dynamic gestures, these oral storytellers provide a framework for the story, then invites the audience to fill in the empty space with their own mental images. In this push and pull, this world invented by the collaboration of a storyteller’s words and a story listener’s imagination, each member of the audience will have a distinctive experience, will be uniquely involved. Children who are engaged with these stories through active listening will be able to gain inspiring values, enhanced vocabularies and memory, and improved narrative and reading comprehension skills.
A story is also a bonding experience, a common cultural touchstone shared by and binding a community together. By listening to local and remote storytellers, from diverse backgrounds all across Canada, children will become more aware, connected, and empathetic with the world around them and its people.