Storytelling Festival

All of our boys participated in the Story Telling Festival for the first and last time. Mark is a sixth grader and will phase out of program next year. Dax is in third grade and will not tell next year because Dad's school dropped the program. Seth, who is a kindergartener, is too young to tell, but he got special permission to tell with the first grade because he really wanted to participate.

Our boys always love this time of year because, like their Dad, they really love to tell stories. They have a few favorites that they've heard dozens of times that have all been crowd pleasers. For Seth, story selection was easy. He wanted to tell the story of How Seth Got His Name. Mom and Dad made this one up a few years ago from a story Dad had heard at his school. Dax wanted to tell a baseball story that Mark had used in the past called Out By a Hare. Mark had been very successful with it a few years before. It was harder for Mark to decide, though, because he's participated so many times. There just weren't that many stories to tell. Finally, he settled on a picture book called Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek.

The boys worked really hard on their stories, adding little flourishes and new ideas to make them better. We told them almost every night for a week before the class level competition. Dax told first, and he advanced to the grade level competition easily. Then Seth told in the first grade competition. He had skipped right over class level and told to the entire grade. Shockingly, he advanced to the school level, even though we weren't sure they'd even consider him qualified. Finally, Mark told to the sixth grade. He was a little rattled at his competition, because they changed his time to earlier, so Mom missed his telling (She was furious!). His story, though well told, wasn't quite as crowd-pleasing as some of the favorites, so he didn't tell to the whole school. Then we got the news that Dax advanced, too, so he and Seth told their stories to the lower grades.

Seth and Dax sat by each other at the school level assembly!

We were pretty worried about Seth, but he got up there with all the confidence in the world and told five hundred kids how he got his name. He did a really nice job, even remembering to pause when the kids laughed or clapped. Dax did a great job on his story, too. At the end of the day they announced that Dax was the overall winner! His story advanced to the District level, which we've never done before. His brothers were so happy for him, which made us really proud of all three of them. Of course, we celebrated with Slurpees, our traditional Storytelling treat.

Seth was so confident. We are really proud of him!

Dax wore his baseball uniform and it fit perfectly with this story!

These were all the storytellers from 1-3 grade.

It was fun to have these two brothers tell together!

The district competition turned out to be pretty anti-climatic. We simply sent a video of Dax performing his story before the deadline. Then we waited.