David Peerless:

May/June 2008

Storyteller (and Head of School)

Merle Froshman

From the first day of our school gathering at Gateway each year David Peerless, our Head of School, welcomed our children with the telling of tales. To our children a story is like a warm greeting, a feeling of belonging for both our new students and an old tradition for our returning students. With his flair for illuminating a story he encouraged us to use our senses and imagination. As a storyteller, he enhanced our library program and put life and enthusiasm to listening and reading.

David’s storytelling contributed to our program.
Let me count the ways…

David's stories and "yarns" reinforced our mission statement and values by encouraging us to do our personal best, committing ourselves to individual, social and environmental responsibilities. He collaborated with teachers and specialists on their curriculum studies and participated in the classroom by relating stories to both younger and older students. Bringing storytelling to our Gateway community provided the students with an appreciation of literature.

David participated in storytelling during our special events. There is always a story for our Promise and Renewal, Ocean Week and other events. For our Peace and Plenty celebration, our Gateway students have hands-on experience learning the whole process of grinding wheat to baking sourdough bread. We have fiction and non-fiction books in our library devoted to bread making. Some of these fiction books have provided David with materials for our celebration. David always has a meaningful story to tell the children about our bountiful harvest. His enthusiastic manner can bring humor and laughter to his stories. Other stories bring touching empathy and thoughtfulness. 

David created a storytelling class at Gateway School which has become an important part of our middle school curriculum. It is a required class for all our students, and he is one of the instructors. Through the art of storytelling it empowers our students with their language skills, self-esteem and gives them a sense of accomplishment as it helps with communication.We want our students to feel comfortable speaking in front of an audience and using storytelling to conveying a folktale is a perfect way to accomplish this. Having our older students as presenters sends a message on how a story can be powerful and engaging by bringing excitement to the individuals in the audience. What a great example for our younger children to see the middle school students whom they admire, perform and pass on a story to them.

Our students make good use of our library facilities and materials by reading a variety of stories. Reading our folktale books provides our middle school students with knowledge about other cultures, understand the similarities and differences in their values, mores, and traditions.

They study elements that are important in the structure of a story. Through this venue they learn to sequence  events and develop plots.  In addition, the practice of these skills makes it helpful in choosing a book to read or a report to write.

David Peerless will be retiring as Head of School in June and moving back to Europe . When asked what he would like for his last days at Gateway School he replied that he just wanted to spend it with the children.

In his honor we held a “David Day ” where special surprise events occurred. He visited all of our classes and they each did something special for him. In one of the first grade classrooms the students use the concept from the “Important Book” by Margaret Wise Brown. Students expressed their thoughts and feelings about why David is important. During our assembly the students of the Advance Storytelling elective class participated by telling “The Three Dolls” tale from India . It epitomizes the wisdom of a storyteller, how he solves a riddle and tells his tale. “David Day ” is our going away gift to a wonderful leader, individual and enjoyable storyteller.

When so many schools are eliminating the library staff, our Head of School has been an advocate of library literacy and sees the value and worth of storytelling, book reading and research. We will miss David very much.

Through David’s storytelling he demonstrates how a story can engage us, be nurturing, help us connect with ourselves and others and bring a school community together.

In many ways David has brought richness to our program.

David on Storytelling:
“Storytelling is so ancient that I think the pleasure and importance of stories must be built into our human genome! It is rare to find a child who does not enjoy listening to well-told stories. Children can listen to stories and ‘get lost in them’ well before they can read.

Children's receptive vocabulary is much larger than often realized so, even when they have started to read, they can listen to, and understand stories that are much more developed and with a richer vocabulary than they can read for themselves. Storytelling/listening is wonderfully effective in enticing children into wanting to read more complex and developed stories than they might push themselves to do on their own.”

“Nowadays most ‘stories’ that children get out of school are via television, video or movies. Not surprisingly, these are much more strongly based on images than on words. Oral storytelling doesn't give children the pictures but rather allows the children to develop the internal ‘picture’ that goes with the word. It has been suggested that this is much more likely to aid reading comprehension as the written word will then trigger the child's own concept of the word. This will make reading richer and more interesting.”   

   Merle Froshman has been the Library Manager for Gateway School in Santa Cruz, California for sixteen years. She has worked in Watsonville, Salinas and San Jose Parks and Recreation as well as for Burbank Unified School District and Long Beach School District in California.

"I love helping children with research projects," Merle says. "I want them to get excited about what they are learning. Acquiring knowledge through my students, finding out more about the subjects they are studying and what interests them are terrific side-effects of my job!"

Merle has traveled throughout the world, including trips to Asia, S.E. Asia, Europe, Africa, South and Central America, Australia and Papua New Guinea. She also enjoys the theater, visiting museums and attending Shark and Warrior games.