Here is a repost from 2016 for Dana, following our recent discussion on the 25 minute thing on NTCI stories:
There are, of course, many keys to success with storytelling. But one of the most important is brevity. We tend to clutter our stories with too many facts and then we wonder why our kids tune out. They don’t understand because there are too many sounds coming their way.
Therefore, the instructor must at all costs work to actively select during the course of creating the story only those salient kinds of sentences that are sparkly, that grab the attention of the kids, that are needed to drive the story forward.
When the teacher is aware that they have happened on a salient line, a big line, a line that needs repeating, then (they used to call this circling) they should park on that line, asking repeated random questions around that sparkly sentence so that the story is not cluttered.
We therefore create a brief and streamlined story in under 25 minutes by saying only the important things as the story builds, and we leave out all the extra baggage that just weighs the story down and makes the kids tune out. It is entirely OUR responsibility if the kids don’t understand.