Expressive Arts

Stories Using the Expressive Arts

We feel before verbal symbols (oral language) can be efficiently and ethically utilized, some prerequisite conditions should be met.  These include but are not limited to:

• The creation of an underlying safety net, especially for children.
• Assisting the child to feel a sense of belonging.
• Providing a setting modeling and reinforcing contingent back-and-forth pre-verbal processes.

When words are not enough, many stories can be told using nonverbal and preverbal tones or sound bites where contours of social emotional processes and relations can be expressed through the arts, activities adding the verbal exchanges. (even if limited to the adult speaking “in dialogue” for the limited oral language child)  Therefore a significant component in this website section on stories/arts describes early developmental storytelling with and without words being expressed as a way to organize experience. An important experience is when the challenge of these activities matches the child’s abilities and this discovery fosters confidence, self esteem and greater reliance (confidence). The biographical and procedural(our history) memories become encoded for life.

Articles

New Tools in Communication, Narrative Procedures with Children and their Families Using Expressive Arts to Describe their Significant Experiences.
Article Overview: The article linked offers our conceptual understanding regarding preverbal, and verbal expressions of children’s experiences which become their stories.
Click on: Article

Expressive Arts / Activity Web Links

Art Links to web sites exploring adventure activity lists, enriched topics, and means to encourage artful expression are available. Story themes may be utilized for children in working through positive events (sometimes traumatic) that may be incorporated into the child’s bodily systems and tissues through perceptual processes. When the mind processes non-verbally and is in a sense, speechless (enactive or how we act on our world and iconic or visual memory) these bodily and mental states can be worked through and coordinated sometimes with just talking about ordinary experiences.

Food and Stories

Different art forms also allow people to bring many stories into their lives and add an increased sense of  positive self.  Nourishment from the stories is gained when people have learned to appreciate and understand their elements and are taking them in as they would food for their physical bodies.  The right stories are like food for the spirit and soul.  Incorporating such stories into one’s body fuels the deep sense of people being and becoming the best one could possible be and become.  Our lives depend on these acts of feeling ourselves through the stories we live by and how we are affected by other peoples’ stories.

Able incorporates this practice and models for others by seeking grant support from a foundation to help parents find and fund such enriched artful experiences and enriched activities. We ask in return that these expressions are storied so they can be incorporated in ones bodily processes and identity.

Storytelling

http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/mff/folklore_your.htm (folklore telling and listening that includes legends, myths, folktales and fairy tales and more stemming from the cultural communities from the campfires through the ages.)

http://www.eldrbarry.net/roos/eest.htm (from an activity or arts event or any positive or challenging experience, a child can with help express the experience in words and perform what happened (not just by using a storybook.)

Best Children’s Books-Storytelling.pdf  (magical power of words–storytelling ones life story. How to make up stories from the ordinary events of the day. Can parenting get better if Mom or Dad tells their early life story more coherently?)

http://www.piratesinpajamas.com/index.php?page=15  (helping parents help children tell a story especially at bedtime or anytime—powerful outcomes.)