Storytelling activities for children

Schools often emphasize storytelling, listening, and speaking skills to improve children’s critical skills. Read here how storytelling influences them every day at school and home.

Why do we teach children storytelling?

Through storytelling, you can nurture a child’s personality and creative abilities. Today’s academics and curriculum demand students to be quick and adept at public speaking. Storytelling is an exciting way to make your children feel confident about participating in these activities. There are other benefits that children reap from storytelling. These include:

Cognitive engagement

Cognitive development is all about learning and how children interpret what they understand about the environment. Through storytelling, they realize how to approach a situation and handle people. Children also get to utilize their sensory organs, which quickens cognitive development.

Empathy instruction

Social interaction is necessary for children to develop the right feelings and attitudes, and children must value others’ feelings and empathies to avoid awkward social situations. When they participate in storytelling sessions, children come across various fictional characters through whom they know how thoughts and emotions shape people.

Literary enhancement

It’s true that reading and storytelling together sharpen a child’s vocabulary and other literary skills like writing and speaking.

Strengthening of partnerships

When parents and children do a storytelling session together, their relationship improves as they learn their differences and similarities and learn more about others’ perspectives.

Increase in concentration, imagination, and creativity

Reading aloud helps children to concentrate better on their activities, as they are keen to know what happens in the story. Likewise, their imagination and creativity are also improved as children come across many fictional characters and situations which they might connect to their real lives.

How to involve your children in storytelling?

Start with personal storytelling

Everyone’s always a beginner at something. Hence, one can’t expect children to be expert storytellers on the first go. Instead of asking them to narrate fictional stories, let them tell their personal stories initially. They can create a brand-new story with their characters with practice and time.

Incorporate digital storytelling

Though traditional storytelling involves reciting and reading aloud at school or home, digital storytelling has become the norm. Apps like Flip Grid, Toontastic, and Make Beliefs Comix help them to record their own stories or narrate, animate, and add soundtracks to their stories.

Spoon puppet character development

Wooden spoons will be available at stores for affordable rates. Give these to your children and ask them to draw a face or imagine it to be one of the characters in their story. To make it enjoyable, you and your family or friends can join you to make the story and characters more exciting.

Storytelling with finger puppets

You can find finger puppets in different sets where three to four children can simultaneously participate. According to the characters you choose, give them a storyline, and let them improvise the arc and story by themselves at school or home.

One-word story activity game

This activity will be fun if there are more than ten children. The first person must say a word aloud, and the next child in line must narrate a story with several words given to them. This is how a one-word story has to be played. Parents and teachers can make rules so that children think and play with a lot of thinking and determination. This activity improves the sequencing ability in children at an early stage.

Collect and build a story

Children can find several objects at home and school. Ask them to narrate a story based on the thing you give them. Their story needs to be lengthy, but ensure it spans at least two to three minutes.

Amity School Sharjah has a kindergarten curriculum that makes preschoolers champions of storytelling and other extra-curricular activities from the beginning. Our school follows this syllabus to introduce students to inspiring real-life and fictional stories to shape their future success.