Tell Me a Story...

For many adults hearing a request like, “Tell me a story” can cause us a great deal of anxiety and a desperate search for a place to begin. Take heart; telling a story is something than can be learned with a little practice and self-charity. Storytelling is essentially one person telling others about something. The story can be of a real event or made up. Can you see how easy it is? We all tell many stories each and every day through our conversations. There is of course an entire folk art of storytelling. However, for our purposes, we are going to stick to the informal variety.

Oral storytelling is a tool that strengthens both cognitive and social-emotional development in children. Children bolster their self-identity by telling stories of their life events. This helps children understand how their life is interconnected with other people and the world at large. Storytelling also offers plenty of opportunities for problem solving as well as getting inside the mind of imaginary characters and thinking about what the character might think, want or believe.

Cognitively, storytelling allows children to improve their oral language skills. It also helps children develop decontextualized talk - talking about objects, feelings, and ideas experienced in the past or expected in the future. When children listen to a story, they strengthen their imagination by creating images from the story in their mind. This is especially important in a society that most often provides the images and words together - as with picture books and television. Mental imagery is a very important skill needed later in life for reading books and materials where pictures are not provided.

Storytelling activities for kids:

• “Reading” books: Have young children re-create stories from a familiar book by using the pictures. 2^nd step….Have children create a story by looking at pictures in an unfamiliar book.
• Older children that are able to read, as well as younger children, can create stories from wordless books, such as: Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann, Snowman by Raymond Briggs, Good Dog Carl by Alexandra Day. Type “wordless books” into your favorite search engine for a much larger list.
•  Ask your child to tell you something that happened today, last night, or over the weekend. Note: Very young children may only create simple stories with 2-3 sentences at first
• Ask your child to tell about a time they were happy, sad, mad, or scared.
• Make it a group experience. Have children take turns adding to a story.
• Clip pictures out of a magazine and paste on index cards. Take turns pulling them out of a box and creating a story from the images.
• Have children act out a familiar story, such as Goldilocks and the 3 Bears.
• After reading a book or watching a TV program or movie, make up a story about what happens to the characters the next day.

Storytelling activities for adults:

• Re-tell a story you already know, like a classic fairy tale or classic children’s book.
• Tell stories about what your life was like when you were the child’s age. What toys did you play with? Where did you live and what did it look like? What were your friends like? Who was your favorite teacher? Looking at an old snapshot of yourself together can be a great place to start.
• Review the events of the day. What you saw, what you did, where you went, how you felt, etc.
• Find an interesting picture and make up a story about how the picture came to be or what happened after the picture was taken.
• Make up stories where the child, their pet, or their favorite toy is the main character.

Telling stories is a great way to spend the evenings and long road trips. Telling stories also supports your child's emotional need to feel included. Your children will be an eager and very charitable audience- tell them a story.