"And SHE lived happily ever after...." concluded the fairy tale presentations by a group of fourth-grade girls at Rogers Elementary School in Shaler Area School District last week, to the delight of their second-grade audience.

The performance crowned the six-week workshop where the girls honed their craft. Called "Empowering Girls through Fairy Tales," the pilot program taught the 9- and 10-year-olds the art of storytelling and showed them that the heroes are often heroines.

Joan Wolf Schenker trained the eight participants. The Parent Education Coordinator for the North Hills Youth Ministry Counseling Center, Ms. Schenker has taught storytelling to teachers, counselors and parents for 10 years but this is the first time she has trained students.

She taught the youngsters how to choose a story, techniques for remembering the words, how to make eye contact and the way to use gestures and facial expressions to capture an audience's attention.

"I told them to choose a story that they love," she said. The stories, for the most part, came from the book, "Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales," by Allison Lurie.

The eight girls, students at Rogers, met every Wednesday during lunch periods to learn about the history and technique of traveling storytellers.

"It was awesome, I loved it," Emma Young said enthusiastically. "I got to meet all these new girls and I got to be a fairy."

Emma was the only one of the group to don wings and a wand. Mostly, the girls used their voices, expressions and gestures to bring what Ms. Schenker called, "theatre of the face" alive for the audience.

The second-graders were entranced. They watched as Kara Jans and Sara Walker performed "Manka and the Judge." In the end, the judge agrees that Manka, his wife, can make wise decisions, too. "Manka was clever and wise," one of the second-grade girls commented after the story.

Completely unrehearsed, Maia Clare began a pass-along story where each girl added a line of her own to create a comical performance. The audience laughed as they were entertained by their ad-lib tale. Ms. Schenker told the second-graders they should make up their own pass-along stories

Maia was the only solo performer. The confident fourth-grader said she was glad to be alone before the audience. "That way, they pay attention only to me and understand the story better." In "Diamond and Toads," the second- graders learned that speaking nicely brings happiness.

Three girls joined in the telling of "The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle." Taylor Jones and Becca Helfrich were aided by Sara as the fairy heroine in a tale that taught: "Contentment comes from the heart, not the house you live in."

The second- grade boys and girls joined in the chorus with the storytellers.

An original tale written by Shannon O'Leary and Paige Milavec, "That's Good, That's Bad," showed how something good could really be bad and vice versa. "My mom told me I've always been a story teller," Paige commented.

The eight girls joined together for "Rak An San," a type of story where the performers made faces and asked the audience to guess what feeling they were expressing. This, too, fully engaged the 16 second-graders in the class as they worked to interpret the gestures of the actors.

"It was just thrilling for me to teach them," Ms. Schenker said. "It's important for a young girl's safety that they are assertive, capable, strong and confident."

In January, the girls will need to muster their confidence again when they perform for the public at the Shaler North Hills Library. The date is yet to be announced. "We wanted to do it first for the younger children," Ms. Schenker said. The library performance is "our community service."

The program was made possible by a grant from FISA, a local foundation that provides grants to nonprofit organizations in southwestern Pennsylvania that improve the lives of women, girls and people with disabilities like the North Hills Youth Ministry. The grant paid for the training and also provided each girl with a copy of "Clever Gretchen." Ms. Schenker was joined by Heather Kimmel, a guidance counselor at Rogers.