Gianni Rodari
and the art of storytelling
From Gianni Rodari, QUID+ learned how to tell stories: making things up and creating absurd tales can be both great fun and useful for the cognitive development of children.
Gianni Rodari is the only Italian to have won the Hans Christian Andersen Prize in 1970, a prestigious international award for children's literature. In 1973 he published his only theoretical work, “The Grammar of Fantasy. An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories”, an essay for parents and teachers on how to stimulate children’s creativity and storytelling skills. The author provides a number of ideas for stimulating children's imagination, each based on the personal experience he had gained during his years of teaching. He believed imagination should be given back its rightful place in the lives of all of us, recognising the existence of what he called “fantastica”, the discipline that studies imaginative skills. One of the points he holds most dear is the need to restore dignity to creative errors, a subject he addressed previously in “The Book of Errors”: an error is not necessarily something to be corrected, but an opportunity to create new stories, thus developing our child's creativity.
