Storytelling for the sake of storytelling

Who doesn’t enjoy a good story? Humans have told stories to one another since we started walking on Earth. This art expression has not faded since then and we keep regularly using it to help people relate to one another. But apart from the power of connection, in which storytelling charms us, the benefits of it are almost limitless!

As professor Rana Dajani points out, “reading to young children helps to build and maintain synapses, making the brain stronger and healthier. This has a favourable effect not only on cognition and mental capacity, but also on social skills.”

Nonetheless, with technology overwhelming our lives, storytelling importance has been replaced by the new gadgets that surround us. For that reason, in a small effort to explore the advantages of this ancient art, let me show you why you should start telling stories to your young learners at school.

First of all, stories are FUN and motivational for kids. Make sure to choose well animated stories with comprehensible dialogues, where children can interact and easily follow up, even if they get lost in the middle of the story!

Stories are also the perfect way to introduce language in a comprehensible and meaningful way. Don’t forget that you can always replace some content by the grammar or vocabulary you really want to work on.

Besides that, storytelling exposes children to a lot of comprehensible input by using visuals, gesture, mime, and the right tone of voice. As you may already know, as teachers we will sometimes have to learn to be good actors. Storytelling is no exception and mastering it will take us a lot of practice and effort for our part. Learning from professionals and doing various rehearsals before telling the story to our crowd is a must!

While telling the story, the introducer has the chance to revise relevant chunks of language

and to repeat the language over and over again within the natural context of the story. Books such as “Five little monkeys” or “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?” are wonderful examples to work on language repetition.

But, if we are not able to make children participate in history, all our efforts will be in vain. Involving children at many levels: bodies, minds, emotions, language and social interaction is essential. Hence, as I have already mentioned, emphasizing the teacher’s role and the importance of our preparation is fundamental for a successful story. Then and only then is when we can take the most out of it and help children to develop skills such as prediction, guessing, hypothesising, anticipating and message decoding.

If we want them to work on their oral skills, we could even make them become aware of the rhythm, intonation and pronunciation.

Finally, we mustn’t forget to allow children to experience diverse feelings and emotions, prompting them to listen to new tales and approaching them in a natural way to the love of reading.

Some reccomendable books for storytelling