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Compare world stories and create an original myth in this three-week storytelling course for elementary school students on Bryn Mawr College’s campus.
Instructor:
Course Description
A trickster causes trouble, a hero faces a test, and an ordinary creature becomes something impossible. Stories from around the world give familiar ideas surprising new shapes.
In this course your child will follow myths, legends, and folktales across a world map, keeping a mythology passport as they go. Short readings, oral retellings, and reader’s theater bring the stories to life. Your child will compare their patterns and cultural settings, debate characters’ choices, and look for clues in important symbols. Designing a creature or setting adds a challenge of its own: even an imagined world needs rules that hold together.
In the final week, your child will create a myth-inspired story around a big question, natural phenomenon, or human value. Writing workshops and classmates’ feedback help them shape and revise it. After rehearsing, they’ll share an illustrated story, comic, script, or narrated audio piece at a Myth Makers Storytelling Festival.
This three-week course for elementary school students is part of Summer Discovery’s Institute for the Gifted program on Bryn Mawr College’s campus in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The course is available to commuter students.
What You Will Do
• Map stories from different cultures in a mythology passport
• Compare patterns in myths, legends, and folktales
• Retell a story through voice, gesture, and reader’s theater
• Debate character choices using clues from the story
• Invent a creature or setting with its own rules
• Share your original story at the Myth Makers Storytelling Festival
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Compare story traditions using clues from the text and cultural setting
• Explain how characters, conflicts, and symbols help a story make meaning
• Shape a story whose characters and events fit its imagined world
You’ll leave with your mythology passport, story comparisons, finished original story, and a certificate of completion.
Why Mythology Skills Matter
Two stories can share a hero or a monster and still mean very different things. Looking closely at their details and cultural settings helps children support an interpretation with clues, rather than stop at a first impression.
Writing their own myth turns that attention toward choices: what a character wants, what stands in the way, and how the story ends. Revision and storytelling help them make those ideas clear to someone else, on the page or aloud.
Who Should Attend?
For students who have completed 4th or 5th grade.
If your child gets caught up in fantasy worlds or has strong opinions about a character’s choices, there’s plenty to talk about here. Readers, performers, artists, and budding writers have different ways to join in. Short texts from different cultures lead into group storytelling and the chance to revise an original piece with classmates’ feedback.
Institute for the Gifted eligibility requirements apply; see the program FAQ.
Your Summer at Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr gives elementary students a welcoming place to spend the day learning, creating, and meeting new friends. Its historic, tree-lined setting near Philadelphia makes a summer class feel special and academically structured while remaining close enough for students to return home each afternoon.
The commuter-day format combines hands-on academics with a clear daily routine and shared activities throughout the program day. Students can try something new, build confidence through participation, and enjoy the fun of learning on a college campus without an overnight stay. For families, Bryn Mawr offers a thoughtful balance of creativity, academic challenge, friendship, and age-appropriate independence in a structured day-program environment.
After successfully finishing this course, you will be awarded a certification completion for your accomplishment.
*This is a preview, not what you will receive
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College