This was an interesting read. Gianni Rodari was an Italian teacher, writer, and scholar/theorist of children’s literature and the fantastic.
If you haven’t read his The Grammar of Fantasy, I suggest it. It is somewhat theoretical, but also applied: he talks about how he explored writing, stories, and the fantastic with the kids he was teaching, but also brings in philosophical and artistic theories as he does so. The chapters are short, the prose clear.
That’s where I first encountered his suggestion of telling a familiar story to and with kids, and telling it wrong. He recounts how his classes corrected him, but also how the original stories worked as branches onto which kids grafted their own story details and endings. That’s what he does in Telling Stories Wrong (2022), illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna.
The images are colorful and somewhat abstract, and work to slow the familiar story down and communicate the energy kids bring to stories. Once you read the first line, which introduces “a girl called Little Yellow Riding Hood,” you can anticipate the cries of outrage that erupt from the listening kids on page 2–and imagine your listening kids do the same.
Fun in itself, and a useful introduction to thinking about storytelling and creativity.
