Moral of the story

I delivered my third Advanced Project in the Story Telling manual and crashed and burned to some degree! :-P

The title of my speech was "Big Peter, Little Peter" and it was based on a Norway folktale. I was initially attracted to this story because it was rather macarbe. It was a story of 2 brothers Big Peter and Little Peter and how the younger brother was able to use his cunning and wit to outsmart and in fact kill his older brother. On hindsight, a better story could have been found.

My evaluator L gave me a very fair and educational evaluation. Essentially here were the areas for improvement:

• Inappropriate story selection: Less is more! - I had too many details - I overran the time 4-6mins by 100% ending up at 12mins!
• Incongruence of facial expression and tone - It was a macarbe story but I had a smile on my face the entire time....Hmm.. maybe I have the makings of a serial killer (just kidding!)
• To select a shorter story with simpler moral and to embellish it to make it fit the timing would have been a better strategy
• Flow of the story was jerky and abrupt and hard for the audience to follow as there were too many details that did not help to advance the plot

She was kind enough to also feedback that she felt I had the confidence and ability to carry the story through and should capitalise on that to pause often and let the audience follow my pace instead of trying to deliver too many details to the audience.

For my own benefit, I will try to schedule a time to redo this project as I feel that it is an important one given the short duration of 4 to 6 minutes. This is critical to my development as a kidsREAD volunteer if I want to be serious about delivering my speech.

V the President of the Club has done the story telling manual too and he started the meeting by telling us about the story of the donkey who was being buried alive by the farmer when it fell into a pit. But instead of being buried alive as dirt was poured into the pit and onto its head, the donkey shook it off and took one step up and was finally able to escape from the pit.

We are put in the position of the donkey at times, life pours dirt on our heads but we need to shake it off in order to take a step forward.

Onwards with my story telling manual journey!