Choose from these exciting, original kids’ audio stories.

Clem the Detective Dog
Ralphie The Gopher
Sheriff Daisy & Deputy Bud
Rainbow of the Sioux
The Monotonia Chronicles
Tibbodnock Stories
Fiona the Smart Ghost
Ivan the Not-So-Terrible
Nikki the Invisible Girl
Sarabel to the Rescue

Storytelling Tip No 4: Use Your Scrapbook

Listen to Storytelling Tip No 4 or read it below:

Tall Tales Audio presents: Storytelling tips with Jake Warner. Each episode, Jake will provide another tip for improving your storytelling skills. Then, he’ll tell a story using that tip. This week’s tip: Use your Scrapbook.

Rich: Jake, how does that tip work – use your scrapbook?

Jake: Children love stories about their birth, where they came from, when they were small… but they also love to hear about you, their grandparents, and the history of the family. Many kids just can’t get enough of it; so, if you open the photo album to where you were standing with a big fish, that biggest, biggest fish you ever caught, when you were ten years old, and you tell the story of catching that fish to your child, I guarantee you you’ll have a totally rapt, enthusiastic audience.

Rich: Okay, Jake. Let’s hear you use that tip in a story.

Jake: The Adventures of Goofy Bill: Part One: I must have been nineteen that long ago summer, when my friend Bill and I drove off from our East Coast college to spend the summer discovering America – you know, a couple of college kids, an old car, a battered-up guitar, a free summer, no money… hopefully, a lot of fun. From the Midwest to Washington state, Oregon, California, and then back through Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, Bill and I picked fruit and vegetables to pay for gas and food. But since you don’t get rich working in the fields, we mostly slept outside in whatever park or woods we could find. A motel was a once-a-week extravagance, where we could scrape a little bit of the dirt off.

One evening, when we were driving through farm country in the Midwest, we couldn’t find anyplace to sleep. There were no parks around there, only endless farms, each with a fence right to the edge of the road. You know, it was kind of this funny thing, because there was land everyplace – wheat, and corn, and dairy farms… but there were fences right to the edge of the road, and you couldn’t get onto the land. So, we were just driving, and driving, tired, and tired. Where were we going to go, unless we slept in the rocky ditch next to the road? Our only other choice was to spend the night in the car, which was so full of camping gear, dirty clothes, half-eaten food, Bill’s battered guitar… there was barely room for the two of us to sit up.

But then, Bill had this great idea: Why not stop at a farmhouse, and ask if we could sleep on the farm? After all, they had plenty of dirt. So, we picked a beautiful, green dairy farm, turned in the driveway, and knocked on a bright red door. When the farmer came, we said, “Hey, we’re just college kids; we’re a thousand miles from home, and we have no place to sleep, and we have no money to stay in a hotel.” So, the farmer said, fine, we could sleep out on his land. He said, “Well, look… we have a little stream out there, there’s a picnic table, and a fireplace; there’re some pine trees… it’s really nice out there; spend the night, and enjoy yourselves.”

It was a lovely evening as we cooked dinner, and we looked out over the rolling farmland, but we were so tired that instead of playing music, and singing songs, as we often did, we rolled up early in our sleeping bags. Everything went well until a few minutes after first light the next morning. A low fog had settled over our campsite, so we couldn’t see more than about twenty feet. That’s when we heard the big animals coming towards us. We heard them way before we could see them. It sounded like a herd of woolly mammoths trampling across the tundra, getting closer, and closer, and closer to where we were lying in our sleeping bags. Bill, who had grown up in the city, had never been on a farm before, and looked as scared as if he was being approached by a herd of vampires. Then, a weirdly, unearthly bell began to ring: “Clang, clang, clang.” In the dense fog, it seemed for a moment that that odd, echoing “Clang, clang,” might be announcing the end of the world.

That’s when Bill panicked, jumping out of his sleeping bag as if shot from a cannon, and running lickety split towards the nearest pine tree. But too bad: Bill had overlooked two big problems. First, because it had been a warm night, he was 100% completely, and absolutely, naked. Second, since the trunk of the tree Bill was trying to hide behind was less than half as thick as he was, he really wasn’t hidden at all… and that’s when I pushed the flash button on my camera and snapped this picture of my naked friend trying unsuccessfully to hide from a bunch of cows.

Oops! Sorry, I guess I forgot to tell you that because we were sleeping on a dairy farm, I knew that the big, tramping animals were just a bunch of tame cows following their leader who was wearing a bell along the little trail we were sleeping next to headed towards the stream.

Rich: Jake, that’s a true story about the photo, but are all of the details true?

Jake: Right… when you’re telling a story, any story, exaggeration’s always part of it, and it’s up to you to decide where that’s appropriate, obviously. Lying to children is no fun, but maybe that big, biggest, big fish wasn’t really the biggest one that was ever caught, and after all, you have the picture right there, so the kid can see how big the fish is. So, yeah, I think you can have a little fun with it, but the important thing is that when you’re looking for a subject for a story, opening your photo album from when you were a kid, or your grandparents were kids, and taking out something that’s evocative, and telling a story… it lets you do a few things. It lets you humanize you, yourself; it lets your kids see, “Hey, my dad/mom… they weren’t always the biggest, strongest, wisest person; sometimes they did really foolish and stupid things.” I think that stupid stories about when you were a kid are always popular with your kids, because, hey, every kid has a moment where they wonder, “Am I going to really be able to grow up, and negotiate all of this territory to being an adult?” And looking a pictures and hearing stories about when you were a kid, and maybe the time the horse stepped on your foot, or the time you got lost in the woods, or whatever, is helpful to kids in a lot of ways.

For more storytelling tips, check out TallTalesAudio.com, where you can also purchase CDs and downloadable tales from our collection of original children’s’ stories.

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