Stories and music are the means.
Creative, hands-on, engaging and curriculum-integrated learning is the mission.
If you want to see your students' faces light up as they experience the joy of genuine learning,
then you'll want to bring Story Laurie to your school.

create-your-own ResidencY

Story Laurie can work with your students to develop songs and stories specific to your school and community's needs. One such residency program occurred at Mill Road School in Red Hook, NY, in honor of the town's bicentennial in 2012.

Red Hook, NY: Rural Traditions, Community Connections
For this residency, each of the fourth grade classes at Mill Road School worked with Laurie to write its own commemorative song that was performed and recorded as part of a community-wide celebration.

Click here to listen to one of the seven songs that students wrote with Story Laurie.

"Cultivating Connections" Residency

Cultivating Connections is an interactive songwriting workshop for elementary classes designed to cultivate student and community connections with the environment, healthy foods and nutrition, and local farms.

Elementary classes  participate in a three-to-five day program led by Story Laurie that takes students on a journey from learning about gardens and how they grow to thinking critically about the processes taking place there. Students create an original song to be shared with their peers, families and communities, at a public celebration.

Journey to ellis island

In this touching and powerful performance, Story Laurie portrays her grandmother as an immigrant girl full of hopes and dreams. Listeners travel with the young Carmela on this emotional (and often humorous) journey as she departs her hometown of Potenza, Italy, crosses the Atlantic and arrives in New York Harbor, ready to begin a new life in a strange and magical land.

Journey to Ellis Island is available as a stand-alone assembly program (with Q&A) or as a residency program where Laurie helps students develop the skills to research their own family stories. The residency culminates in individual or group art projects (eg. a song written by students and which tells of the collective immigrant experience; class “quilt” that depicts each family’s story).

Flying on the wings of our words

Story Laurie introduces students to the art of storytelling and walks them through the process of preparing their own folk tale or fable for the telling. In the workshop sessions, storytelling and improv games help the students develop useful storytelling skills such as developing eye contact and use of gesture and voice. The artist teaches students to learn their story by developing imagery and creating a storyboard, rather than through rote memorization. In grades 3 and up, students work individually or with a partner; for grades K-2, students learn a group tale to share with other groups or classes.

Miss Mostert's kindergarten class (Delhi Elementary, 2013) sprouting like seeds as they write a song about germination.

A thank you note from Ms. Zweig's Kindergarten class, Mill Road School (Garden Songwriting Residency, May 2012)