Lesson video

Hi, everybody.

Welcome to this lesson on the 'oral tradition'.

It's lesson 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 3,000 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 were 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 seven reasons, I think, why we might like stories, and you might have written some of these reasons down 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 amusing.

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 1, 2, 3 and 4.

One of these is not a reason why we tell stories.

I'd like you to look at these four options.

Option 1, to feel connected to other people.

Option 2, to make money and get rich.

Option 3, to educate each other about the world around us.

And option 4, 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.

So pause the video, write down the number, the one you think is wrong.

Okay.

Well, the one that was wrong was option 2, 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 is fairy stories, stories that are aimed at children.

And these were 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 will 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 ora, is the Latin word for mouth.

Oral is anything to do with your mouth.

So, when you go to the dentist, you might hear the word oral.

But actually when we're using it today, it means anything that is spoken or sang.

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 tradition 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 onto 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 1, when stories are passed on using sign language.

Option 2, when stories are passed on by writing them down.

Option 3, when stories are passed on by repeating them to others.

And option 4, 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 3, when stories are passed on by repeating them to others.

Option 1, 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 2, when stories are passed on by writing them down, isn't correct.

It's all about speech, not about using writing.

And I put in option 4, when you have to clean your teeth really well, just as a trick to see if you remembered that oral can also mean talking, and 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've 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'd 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.

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.

I don't like 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 'oral tradition' has 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 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 things, 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".

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 were 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 the 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 easier to remember, you can use music or repeat word 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, they will be a little 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, the 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.

We're 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.