How do stories travel from one generation to the next? This ready-to-teach packet turns a short music video into three lessons on listening, storytelling, and the African diaspora.
In Stories Have Wings, a West African griot shows how stories travel with people. They hide in the rhythm of a drum, a mother's song, a tear, and a laugh, and they fly like birds across the Great Water to the Caribbean, Brazil, and the Lowcountry. At the end, the griot passes a story bird to a child, and your students become the storytellers.
What's inside (18-page printable PDF):
3 sessions of 20–30 minutes each: Listen Like a Griot, Where Do Stories Hide?, and Be the Griot
Teacher background on griots, the kora, oral tradition, the African diaspora, and Sankofa, with full source links
Teaching Hard History Gently: scripted K–1 and grades 2–3 language for "no chain can hold" and "crossed the Great Water," following Learning for Justice's K–5 framework
When Children Ask…: calm, age-appropriate answers to hard questions
Lyrics with scene descriptions and five pause points
Student pages: six vocabulary cards, My Story Bird, Changed Their Clothes, Same Heart, and a Sankofa coloring page
Family Story Interview in English and Spanish
Griot Checklist with a quick rubric, plus differentiation for K through grade 3
Standards: Common Core SL.K.2–SL.3.2, SL.K.4–SL.3.4, RL.2.4, and W.K.3–W.3.3; C3 Framework D2.Geo.7.K-2, D2.His.2.K-2, and D2.Geo.7.3-5
Works with the free video on Teach Between the Lines TV (2 minutes 5 seconds). A QR code on the cover takes students straight to it.
This packet stands on its own. For classes that want to keep exploring, The Ancestors' Journeys by Bradford Pazant, M.Ed. is optional further reading.
Digital PDF download. No physical product will be shipped.
License: one teacher, for use with their own students. Please do not share, post publicly, or resell.