Kids telling their own stories Fosters Creative Thinking!

This is probably the most obvious point. When kids get a chance to make up and tell their own stories, by necessity, they have to get creative. They have to come up with an interesting plot, some unique characters and their traits, and they have to think ahead of ‘what happens next’ in this story.

Imagination is a wide open world when kids tell their own stories – and that means that they can be the main protagonist, with untold, desired abilities and then go through experiences they dream of having. Or they can name characters after their best friends or siblings, out of affection. Or tell the story of their pet’s adventures in the outdoors when nobody’s watching. Making things up means coming up with ideas that no one has told them before. And this can be the starting point to even more creative thinking. But encouraging imagination through kids’ own storytelling can help open their minds to new creative ideas.

Kids being the storyteller can Develop Language Skills!

Stories don’t have to be made up to encourage creativity. Even finding the words to retell what really happened can encourage new ways of being able to express oneself. This is described as a benefit of a writer whose parent encouraged storytelling as a child. In addition to language skills, and exercised creativity, the writer realized about his parent’s strategy that:

“What seemed like just a game to us was really a fantastic learning opportunity. They were teaching us to translate the information and knowledge we had picked up throughout the day into words.”

Kids can learn Presentation Skills and Organizational Thought when Telling Stories!

Part of the skill of storytelling is being able to maintain audience interest. This involves at least two things:

• Being able to dramatize the story verbally through bodily actions, or tone of voice and use of descriptive language.
• Being able to organize a story with a clear beginning, middle, climax and end. Sometimes this also involves coming up with a morale to a story, which takes planning and deeper thought.

Being able to read out loud a story that a child wrote and illustrated can also result in self confidence. As adults, we know it’s hard to put ourselves out there. But when we take that risk, and then see that people loved our work, and it wasn’t so scary after all, we can get better at doing it again. Thus, kids can learn to be good presenters and articulators of information through the practice of telling stories.

Telling stories helps kids with Learning Other Subjects!

One must have heard this quote in our lifetime, which rings true for all learners, not just little ones:

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -Benjamin Franklin

So, based on that logic, it makes a lot of sense that when you make kids the storytellers, they can learn easier. According to this essay, “the process of constructing stories in the mind, is one of the most fundamental ways of making meaning, and thus pervades all aspects of learning.”

In other words, encouraging kids to tell stories helps them remember things. Let’s take vocabulary for example. It is a literacy skill that all adults will need in their life. So if you learn a word, that is one thing. But if you then find a way to use it in your own story, you have made it ‘yours,’ in a sense. It’s more likely you’ll remember that word in the future, especially having used that new knowledge in a real-life application or context. And in storytelling, you are, in a sense, teaching what you’ve just learned.

But far beyond that, as the essay linked to above notes, you can use storytelling to help kids memorize facts about any subject. If they are learning a science lesson, telling stories about that subject can help them “internalize” it.

For further information Write to us