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The 7th-8th Grade Storytelling Competition

November 30, 2017

The 7th-8th Grade Storytelling Competition

On November 24th, the two afternoon CAS classes were used for the wonderful Storytelling Competition. Competitors from all levels and grades gathered, sitting in the very front row. When I walked past them, they were either staring at their scripts intently, or closing their eyes and trying to memorize them thoroughly. The students who weren’t participating were pretty excited, so the ASB members used carefully designed signs and ‘patrolled the ground’ to keep the students quiet.

On the stage, there was a long table with serious-looking judges chatting quietly to each other, probably about what was going to come up next. After a while, the competition Ms. Stromheyer announced the beginning of the competition.

As a spectator and an almost-competitor, I was more than giddy to watch the performances. From watching how the talented participants instilled meaning and depth into a story and carefully inspecting their ‘extravaganza’, which I’m not exaggerating at all, the students can learn a lot. The hand gestures and movements, especially seen in the H and H+ students’ performances, were used almost perfectly. How they strolled around, picked up pace when the plots twists, and used wide ranges of gestures to demonstrate their feelings was a great example for the rest of the students to learn from. The participants’ pacing, not literal pacing but the story line pacing, is also something important when storytelling. To catch the spectators’attention, you would need to use a dramatic voice, meaning that you should slow down at times, and increase the speed in an overwhelming way (this is only an extreme example) when appropriate. Of course, I have only understood these skills quite shallowly recently, figuring out the surface meaning of good storytelling skills.

The 7th and 8th graders all did a wonderful job, expressing themselves thoroughly and becoming quite intoxicated in their own stories. The 8th grade stories were based on the theme of horror, and I am pretty sure the audience was terrified of every horror story that was presented on stage. As impressive as every short story presentation was, there were of course ones which came in 1st place, and ones which did not receive any award. Sarah from 7(4) and Joy from 8(7) won first place for the S to S+ category, and Mimi from 7(1) and Peiran from 8(3) won first place for the H to H+ category. Every storyteller tried their very best. They used props, techniques, acting skills, and everything else they could possibly think of.

The competition is a combination of the love of writing, and the passion of performing. To write is purging your mind of what has been lately haunting you, creating what you think. To perform what you write is to introduce your created characters to the world, presenting them the way you interpret them. That is the spark of magic powering the Storytelling Competition.

(Written by Crystal Zhao from 7(11) Pictures by Ms Golden Zheng Supervisor: Ms Chen Fan)