How To Record Stories & Boost a Child’s Storytelling Skills
Posted by EYR Team on 19th Dec 2019
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This article has been written by storytelling specialists, Tonya and Natasha, from Little Creative Days. Tonya and Natasha are sisters and authors of a series of books about a little dog called Pojo who gets itchy paws and goes off on adventures. They have won multiple awards for their accompanying puppet making kits including the Teach Early Years Excellence award for Communication and Language.
Why are stories so important?
Telling stories is what makes us human, we all tell them every day but how do we first learn to tell stories?
We regularly say that children are natural storytellers. They hear stories everywhere and they use them to make sense of the world and solve their problems. Their brains are like sponges and they absorb everything going on around them which is why it’s so important to read to them from a very early age.
It’s been proven that the more words that a child knows by the age of 8 is their biggest predictor of their future success, regardless of their social and economic backgrounds. Stories play a big role in helping children to boost their vocabulary, they help them model language and articulate their thoughts and feelings.
But wouldn’t it be good to capture the stories they tell?
Recording children’s stories is a fantastic way to help them benefit further and enhance their storytelling skills. As we know if a child can tell a story then they will be able to write one and it helps them learn how to structure a story.
How do you record stories?
Something we have done very successfully with young children is after a storytelling session we get the children to act out how the characters in the story react and behave. Then we’ll retell the story with them acting it out and us directing it. The children love doing this and they really throw themselves into acting it out.
Afterwards we sit them down in small groups and do a little brainstorming session with them.
We generally use one of our Pojo stories as a basis for the story but feel free to use a character from another story.
- We then ask the children to think up a place where Pojo could go to and list them down.
- We then ask them to think up a character he could meet and list those.
- After that we get them to think up some problems their characters could encounter.
- Once we have the lists we get the children to vote on each one so that we’ve got a character, a place and a problem.
- We ask the children to tell us the story and we scribe it for them.
- The children love the fact that they have written a story and because they’ve been involved in writing it, it means so much more to them and they remember it.
The benefits of this approach:
- It shows the children how to structure a story.
- It helps to build their enthusiasm and confidence for telling and eventually writing stories.
- It helps to develop their imaginations and develop ideas for stories
- It helps them understand how to convey feelings so builds their emotional development.
- It helps them build relationships with their peers as they all work together to create the story.
