Storytelling
By Sue Wiedermann
Whether it’s with a book, puppets/toys/objects or simply orally telling a story, children can become so immersed in this wonderful experience. To engage and maintain their attention it’s important to use your voice, facial expressions and to over exaggerate emotions, while still maintaining your authenticity. Children will quickly lose interest if they don’t believe you are as immersed and excited by the story as they are. Stories are such a great way to expand children’s play, exploration and knowledge. Experiences can be developed around the story and incorporated into every aspect of the curriculum and children’s play. Follow children’s lead with stories. They might just want to talk about the pictures in a book rather than listen to the words, they might make up their own stories based on one they’ve heard before, they might act out the story or may even want to write or draw their own story. Children love providing words to their drawings which can be written down by an adult, turned into a book then read back to them and others. Just as importantly they might not want to listen at certain times to the story you have chosen. To initially gain children’s attention, I’ll often whisper that I have a very special ‘something’ in my bag that I want to use to help tell a story. If it’s an animal puppet/toy, I’ll say it will only come out when it’s very quiet. I can guarantee that children will become quiet and be enthusiastically waiting in anticipation.
Repetition is important for children’s learning and development so if they continually ask to be told the same story it is important to honour this, as this is helping them process the information they are receiving. Rhyme and repetition in stories is also a great way to maintain engagement and an important way to develop language and pre-literacy skills. Traditional fairy tales such as The Three Little Pigs or The Three Billy Goats Gruff are great stories for repetition. I use these repeatedly either reading the story or mostly using puppets/objects. Children can then over time recall and retell the story. This will require them to practice sequencing the story which again is another important pre-literacy skill. These are also great stories to act out. Children can problem solve how to make houses or a bridge, negotiate who will be what character, practice listening, speaking and waiting for their turn. After telling the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, so many objects become bridges for children to build, climb on and off and balance over to get to the nice green grass. This then helps to develop physical skills, spatial awareness and motor planning, so you can see how extensively storytelling can be extended throughout children’s learning and development.