Hillside Grade School first grader Leona Paul needed to stretch to reach the microphone on the stage of the Hillside Grade School gym, but she didn’t have any trouble making herself heard during the school’s 18th annual storytelling festival earlier this month.
Lepna stood as tall as she could and recited a Disney story called “Tarzan Goes Bananas,” enunciating the perfectly memorized piece with poise and proper pace. She never rushed the story about Tarzan’s contest with his jungle animal friends to see who could pick the most bananas.
Tarzan won, and Leona was the winner from a field of seven first graders and one second grader who demonstrated their skills at storytelling in the school festival.
Leona said she had taken tips from her family in the month she worked on the piece and performed it in front of them. But when asked how she felt about winning, words nearly failed her.
Leona’s answer was more than good enough for Barbara Nelson, the Hillside Grade School librarian who directs the annual contest.
“I want them to keep the art of story-telling going. The stories come alive every year,” Nelson said.
Nelson said she and HIllside Grade School principal Karen Olynk had held auditions among 80 students vying to compete in the annual storytelling fest.
“They all want to be a part of it,” said Nelson, who added that until this year she never had seven first graders compete for the big prize before.
Nelson said she selected more than a dozen stories of varying lengths and levels of difficulty for the contest. Two years ago, she recalled, two students delivered the classic Abbott and Costello baseball comedy routine “Who’s on First?” without making an error.
During the Friday afternoon contest, the gym rumbled with the sound of pounding hands and feet just before each winner was announced. They stayed fairly silent through each reading, except where laughter was appropriate.
A panel of four judges, including New Hyde Park-Garden City Park Superintendent of Schools Robert Katulak, Odyssey enrichment teacher Sheila Bet and Adelphi University professor Nicholas Petron, evaluated the storytellers for all the basic skills and the all-important element of expressiveness in their deliveries.
“It’s the one opportunity that any child who excels at storytelling and has an ability to perform can share their talents with their peers,” Katulak said.
He said he liked the storytelling festival because it presented the students “a level playing field” apart from their academic abilities.
The stories were uniformly amusing as well, with students delivering them with varied inflection and gestures that seemed fairly natural and not practiced.
Fourth graders Pia Rose Alana and Alissa Kim took top honors among third and fourth graders for their animated recitation of “I Got Two Dogs” by John Lithgow. Fifth grader Alaina Alias won among the fifth and sixth graders for her memorable delivery of Judy Sierra’s “The Secret Science Project That Almost Ate the School.” The title summed up the plot but fails to convey the gruesome details of a growing ball of slime that successively digested a cat, a kid, a dad and a third grade teacher – or the technique that Alias applied to the tale that drew gales of laughter from the audience.
If the students were evaluated on costume presentation, sixth graders Angel Shaji, Isabelle Lopez and Carol Sung might have been recognized for their appearance in antennae and sunglasses to recite of “Earthlets as explained by Professor Xargle” by Jeanne Willis. But the emphasis in the contest was delivering the words, and Alias took the prize.
Alias took that stage at Hillside Grade to perform “Secret Science Project” again at the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park Board of Education meeting on Monday night and received an enthusiastic response from the board members and district residents in the audience.
“It’s a way of communicating and passing down a tradition,” Nelson said. “There’s a beauty in that language and I want them to have that.”
For their efforts, the winners had their pick of a selection of – what else? – storybooks to read, and memorize if they liked.
