Through the Grapevine: World Tales Kids Can Read & Tell

Winner of the Storytelling World Award




Have you ever played the game "Telephone" (or "Gossip"), where one person whispers a sentence to another and that person whispers it to the next? If you have, you know that by the time the sentence gets around a circle of people, it has almost always changed, sometimes drastically. In the same way, stories are passed "through the grapevine," they grow and change and take on many forms.

The stories in this book show just how powerful the grapevine can be. Most of them have been making rounds for hundreds of years. Many of them are found in slightly (or very) different forms in countries thousands of miles apart. All of them are fun to read out loud, and especially fun to tell. Each story has tips for telling the story without the book, and the authors encourage budding tellers to "take these stories and make them your own." These multicultural stories will teach readers the importance of caring, fairness and respect.

Martha Hamilton & Mitch Weiss Bio: 

Martha Hamilton and Mitch Weiss are a husband-and-wife writing and storytelling team known as "Beauty and the Beast Storytellers." They have traveled the world sharing their passion for the oral tradition and the art of telling great stories. They have co-authored thirteen books and two audio recordings with August House. A number of their books have won prestigious awards including the Irma Simonton Black and James H. Black Award for Excellence in Children's Literature (awarded by Bank Street College of Education), Parents' Choice Award, National Parenting Publications Awards, and Storytelling World Award. Mitch and Martha's story collections include world tales that they tell in a conversational manner so that children can easily comprehend and then share the stories by telling them to other students. Parents and teachers can find a wealth of information on how to get children excited about reading, telling world tales, and making up their own stories at Mitch and Martha's website.