﻿Hi, everybody. Welcome to this lesson on the oral tradition, It's less than one, The Origins of Storytelling. My name is Miss Kuhivchak, and I will be doing your lesson today, but before we start, making sure you're in a quiet place. Make sure your phone is turned off, you're somewhere where you won't be distracted. and when you're ready, we will get started. I'm going to share today's agenda. An agenda just means a list of things we're going to do. So in this lesson, we're going to think about four things. We're going to think about what a story is. We're going to think about why we tell stories. We're going to think about how we tell stories, and finally, you're going to learn about something called the oral tradition. After that, there will be a small quiz to see how much you have learned. Our first big question for today is thinking about what is a story. Now for me, stories are the reasons that I love teaching English because I love reading stories, I love thinking about stories, and I love sharing stories with my students. Often when I ask my students what a story is, they say Miss, it's something that starts with a beginning, and it has a middle, and it has an ending, which isn't wrong. It's true. Stories do have a beginning and a middle and an ending, but that's not the reason that we share them. Stories are tales of events that we find interesting, and we find them so interesting that we share them often. We share them regularly. We share them more than once. We share them over and over again. The first thing that I'd like us to do together is just to think off the top of your head of a story, a story that you know well, a story that you like, a story that really sticks with you, and get your pen, write down the name of that story, and I'd like you to write down two reasons why you like that story. I've got a story in my head, and I will tell you what my story is in a minute, but first, pause the video. I want you to do that task. Okay, I'm going to tell you the story that I was thinking of. My story is a story called "The Odyssey," and it's a long poem composed we think about 3000 years ago, and it's an exciting story. It's a story of adventure. We have a hero, Odysseus, who sails across the ocean for 10 years, and he has trouble getting home. One of the things that I really like about the story, apart from the fact that it's an exciting adventure and there are monsters and gods and fights, is the character of Odysseus himself because he makes quite a few mistakes on his journey, and those mistakes have consequences that mean he takes longer to get home. So when we read the story of "The Odyssey," we feel sorry for Odysseus, but we also think why did you make those choices? That was stupid. I love "The Odyssey" so much that actually I have got seven different copies of it. You can see on this PowerPoint a selection of them from my house, which is evidence of how much I love this story, but it's also an example of why stories are useful. There are several reasons I think why we might like stories, and you might have written some of these reasons, as well. I said that "The Odyssey" is an exciting tale of adventure. Well, we like stories because they're entertaining. They're funny. They're amuzing. We want to listen to them. We want to find out how they end, and I said that Odysseus makes mistakes, and he learns from them. We like stories because they tell us things and they educate. They can inform us of things that we didn't necessarily know, and I said Odysseus is an interesting character. Stories also give us a connection. We feel connected with the character. We feel connected maybe with the person that's telling you the story. We might feel connected with each other in your classroom when you read. So these are reasons why we read stories and why we listen to stories. They entertain us. They educate us, and they connect us. On the screen, you should see four options, option one, two, three, and four. One of these is not a reason why we tell stories. I'd like you to look at these four options, option one, to feel connected to other people, option two, to make money and get rich, option three, to educate each other about the world around us, and option four, to entertain ourselves. I'd like you to write down the number of the one you think is not a reason why we tell stories. Then pause the video, write down the number of the one you think is wrong. Okay, well, the one that was wrong was option two, to make money and get rich. That might happen if you tell stories. There are some authors who've gotten very rich from telling stories, but it's not going to happen to everybody. So that was the incorrect option. The other three, to connect, educate, and entertain are the reasons why we like to tell them. So that's why we tell stories. We're going to think about how we tell stories, and actually, all of you know how we tell stories already because this happens in your classroom all the time. We usually record stories in two ways. We write them down, and then we read them. Books are published. They record what has been told in the story to be stored exactly as it was told for as long as that book exists, and that seems like a fairly basic thing to say, but it's not the only way that we tell stories, actually, and I've got a little challenge for you. On the next screen, you're going to see some phrases, some phrases that you might know really, really well. and I want you to be able to finish them off. There are four phrases in the pink boxes. Get your pen. You will see gaps in them. I'm going to give you some time to write them out and fill in the gaps to the best of your ability. So pause the video. Off you go. Okay, now you filled in the gaps in the phrases. Let's see what you might have put in there. Once upon would have been finished with the words a time. You will have heard of long, long ago, maybe in a land far, far away, and they lived happily ever after. These phrases are really, really common in stories, often what we think of as fairy stories, stories that are aimed at children, and these were a really good example of the way we tell stories and how we remember them. If you knew these phrases, you will have found them really easy to remember, and that's because you would have heard them so many times before that you didn't even have to think about it, and this is how stories originally started. Before societies learned to write, before most people could write, the way that stories were told was simply by telling them and remembering them. Stories don't have to be written down. They don't need to be in books to exist. We learn them off by heart. We learn them through memory, and then we can recite them. and we might not recite them the same every time, but we generally remember stories pretty well. Now this is actually what's called the oral tradition. Now, aura is the Latin word for mouth. Oral is anything to do with your mouth, so when you go to the dentist, you hear the word oral, but actually when we're using it today, it means anything that is spoken or sung. So the oral tradition, when it comes to stories, is you imagine your story. You think of your story, and you learn it off by heart. You tell your story to somebody else who shares that story with other people, and that story is passed on so long as somebody remembers what happened, but nobody needs to write the story down so long as you remember what was in it. So let's go back over to this new vocabulary. I've got the word oral. That's communication with your mouth, usually talking or singing. We've also got the word tradition, and traditional means something that's handed on to someone else, something that's passed down to somebody, usually something that's important, something that you value. So in this case, you're handing down a story that you think is interesting to another person. It might even be the next generation, so the older people in a society tell the story to the younger people who pass it on to their children and so on and so on. So it's a way of keeping a story alive, but you don't have to be using writing. Okay, that's a new concept. There are four options on the screen. The question is what is the oral tradition? I'm going to read them to you, and then I want you to think about which one is the correct definition, option one, when stories are passed on using sign language, option two, when stories are passed on by writing them down, option three, when stories are passed on by repeating them to others, and option four, when you have to clean your teeth really well. So pause the video. Think about what is the correct definition of the oral tradition. Okay, the correct definition was actually option three, when stories are passed on by repeating them to others. Option one, when stories are passed on by using sign language wouldn't be the correct answer because remember oral means to do with your mouth and to do with talking. If we're using sign language, you're not using your mouth. Option two, when stories are passed on by writing them down isn't correct. It's all about speech, not about using writings. and I put in option four, when you have to clean your teeth really well, just as a trick to see if you remembered that oral can also mean talking. It doesn't just have to mean going to the dentist. So here we go. The oral tradition, when stories are spoken and shared by word of mouth and learned by heart without using writing to remember them. We talked about what the oral tradition is, the use of speech to pass on through memory stories to other people, and now I want you to spend a couple of minutes thinking about what the advantages and disadvantages are of orally composing instead of writing down a story. So take two minutes, pause the video to think what are the positives of this method and what are the negatives of this method? Okay, now, there are four main points here to consider, and perhaps you have thought about some of them. One of the advantages of oral composition or oral tradition is that anyone can share the story. You don't need to be somebody special in order to tell it, and you don't even need to be able to write. You don't even need to be able to read. You just need to be able to use speech to pass on your ideas and your tale to an audience. However, if you aren't writing things down there are some disadvantages, and if you don't write down your story, there's a possibility it could be forgotten, it could be completely lost, or it can be changed over time into something that's different from the original idea, and unlike when you buy a book, which has the author's name on the cover, if the story is passed on through word of mouth, there's a high chance that nobody will remember who originally told the story if it's passed on through multiple people. So the idea of the oral tradition in some ways is really exciting and freeing because anybody can be involved, but it means that, in the future, sometimes we lose part of the history of the stories that we have learned, and of course, there's also the challenge of just remembering the story. So your next task is a memory task. I would like you to think of one song that you're confident that you know all the lyrics to, and I'd like you to write down as much of the song as you can remember. So pause the video. Think of the song. See if you can write down all of the words. Off you go. Okay, now, depending on the song that you thought of, you might have found that pretty easy. Personally, I immediately thought of the song "Happy Birthday," extremely easy song to remember, something that we sing often, and something that's pretty repetitive. It uses the same words over and over again, and that is part of the oral tradition. The tradition is helped if actually stories use music, and it's also easier to remember stories if there are words that are repeated over and over again. So if you are learning a long tale, the tale of Odysseus 3000 years ago has 24 different sections. How do we remember the whole 24 different sections? Well, it helps a lot if we use music. Music is a brilliant aid for memory, and actually, a lot of what happens in these 24 sections is repeated. It comes up over and over again, which means you're far more likely to remember it when you're singing or speaking it. So these are two ways that the oral tradition becomes a lot easier. We have these memory aids of repetition and music. So we've talked about oral tradition. We've talked about how it's partly about memory, and it's about sharing things that you find entertaining, and my story that I love, "The Odyssey," is a really long story, a poem that was learned off by heart originally. We believe that we would have had some form of music that would have gone alongside it, so the person talking or singing might have had a musical instrument, but we don't actually know the original author of "The Odyssey," and we don't know if there was even one particular author or if there were several people that did it. We have no written record at all of how this poem came to be. It was written down many years later after it was originally composed, and as you go through these lessons with me, a lot of the poems that we will study together will have been created in the same way as "The Odyssey." They will have been poems that would have been sung, and we don't necessarily know the author. So on the one hand, it's really exciting. On the other hand, it's a bit of a mystery. Who were the people that created these poems? We don't really know. We're nearly at the end of the lesson, and at this point, we're going to review some of these concepts and ideas that we've been going through. There are four sentences on the screen, one, two, three, four, and they are not complete. They've got some blanks. Your task is to go through the sentences, fill in the blanks to the best of your ability. Sentence one, we tell stories for several reasons, to connect, something beginning with E and also to. Finish it off. Number two, usually we record stories by fill in the blanks. Number three, the oral tradition is when stories are learned by blank instead of being written down, and number four, to make stories easier to remember, you can use something or something words and ideas. So pause the video, have a go at copying those out and filling them in. Okay, let's review these sentences. So number one, we tell stories for several reasons, to connect, and it was also to entertain and to educate, two E's. Number two was how do we record stories? Well, we talked about how we record stories by writing and by reading. However, number three is about the oral tradition, which is when stories are learned by heart instead of being written down, and number four was to make stories easy to remember you can use music or repeat words and ideas as a memory aid. So to recap everything we've done today, we've talked about what is a story? We've talked about why we tell stories. We talked about how stories are told. You learned about the oral tradition, and after this, there will be a different quiz, as well, for you to do, and next week, we're going to talk a little bit about the types of stories that are learned orally and types of stories that different societies tell and the reasons that they do that, and you might hear about some stories that you know already. Some of them might be new to you. Going to do a bit travelling around the world and think about some different places and some different cultures. Well, that brings us to the end of today's lesson. Well done on all the fantastic learning you've done today. Remember, after this, you'll complete your quiz to do a little review of your learning, and if you're able, please take a picture of your work and ask your parent or carer to share it with your teacher so they can see all of your lovely work, and if you'd like, ask your parent or carer to send a picture of your work to Oak National on Twitter so I can see all your lovely work, as well. All that's left for me to say is thank you and well done for listening, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your learning for today.

In this lesson, we will think about the reasons why we love to tell stories, and where stories come from.

English

Y7 English

Key Stage 3

Year 7

Miss

The Origins of storytelling

The Oral Tradition

History of English Literature and Language

THEME

UNIT

Myths and Folktales

The English Language

Lesson overview: The Origins of storytelling

Video

Presentation

Exit Quiz

Transcript

3 lessons in The Oral Tradition: