What Your Child Can Learn From Oral Storytelling
Storytelling is an ancient art, a mode of expression common to every culture in the world. As a human race, we’ve been telling stories since we could speak to share our experiences with the people around us. We’re hard-wired to tell stories. Each of us has an innate tendency to create a narrative about how we see and experience the world. Through stories, we make sense of life.
Think about how many the times you share an anecdote about an event: a disastrous visit to the hair stylist, the unexpected chaos of your five-year-old’s birthday party, or all the times you’ve listened patiently as your child recounts what the hilarious green frog said in the puppet show at school that day. They’re our stories about everyday life.
Your child probably loves listening to you tell a favourite story, and, while you might have guessed, they’re getting much more out of that experience than mere entertainment. Storytelling is one of the primary ways to nurture a child’s imagination, creativity, memory, language, and a host of other developmental skills.
It’s a meaningful way to pass information from one generation to the next, express emotion, communicate a concept, and explore a phenomenon. Think about it––did your knowledge of world history stick because you read about events in a textbook or because you listened to your grandfather’s stories about what the world was like when he was a child?
Keep reading to discover where storytelling comes from, how it’s different than reading a book, and why you want to make it a regular activity with your child.
Storytelling is one of the primary ways to nurture a child’s imagination, creativity, memory, language, and a host of other developmental skills.
The Origin of The Story
Some of the oldest symbols of storytelling in history date back to nearly 36,000 years ago, scrawled on the walls of the Chauvet cave in France. Stories speak through Egyptian hieroglyphics from around 3000 B.C., and come to life through the lips of the world’s indigenous populations. Oral stories and pictorials symbolized events of that time and documented religious messages.
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Storytelling demonstrates our human capacity to represent thought and imagination. Stories were told before we could write as a way to pass cultural information to the next generations to keep traditions and values alive. Canada’s aboriginal communities, for example, still exist because of “oral tradition”––the telling of stories without ever writing them down.
It’s fascinating to recognize that the development of a child’s literacy skills mimics the historical evolution of literacy as a human race. First we speak, then we learn to read and write (in most cases). And before any of those milestones, we use gestures to communicate (which we see in an infant’s facial expressions, arm waving, and their preverbal ability to sign).
Why Tell a Story?
In an era where we have paperbacks, e-books, magazines, movies, YouTube, and Netflix series, why should we care about oral storytelling? What possible educative value could it have for developing young children’s literacy skills?
Educational experts agree that oral storytelling is not a dead art. It is alive and present not only in traditional societies but also in many early childhood learning programs that use a variety of creative methods to enhance young children’s language and literacy skills.
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Storytelling Vs. Story Reading – What’s the Difference?
You might be wondering why you’d ever choose to tell a story rather than read a book. Because a book includes text, reading with your child may seem to be a richer experience with more developmental advantages than storytelling, which models only oral language. One is not better than the other, and there are indeed more similarities than differences between the two in terms of how they support your child’s acquisition and expansion of language. But the distinctions, while few, are significant enough to make you want to trade up a few of you and your child’s book reading sessions for some dramatic storytelling.
On the one hand, reading a book fosters decoding skills, which is the ability to recognize that letters and letter combinations have particular sounds and applying that knowledge to sound out unfamiliar words. Decoding is exclusively a reading skill.
Storytelling, on the other hand, in the absence of a book, relies on how a story is told, using expressive language and props to bring it to life. It models voice inflection, facial expressions, and gestures as communicative forms of expression.
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While books contain pictures that support the text and attract your child’s interest, pictures are static images, and the story remains on the pages of a book. In contrast, effective storytelling is dramatic and dynamic, it actively involves your child in the experience and invites them to be a co-creator. More than telling, it is enacting a story.
What is Storytelling?
★ Telling a personal narrative from your own childhood
★ Inventing a story about a favourite object, animal, or place
★ Recalling the story from a book you loved as a child
★ A dramatic rendition of a story your child loves,
using puppets and other props to bring the story to life and experience it in a concrete way.
The Learning Benefits of Storytelling for Every Child
Improves Comprehension & Memory
Research suggests that storytelling can increase comprehension and sharpen memory. In studies that compared children who were told a story versus children who were read a story, the children in the storytelling group recalled events and understood the meaning behind a story better than children who were read a book.
One of the reasons for this might be that when children (and adults, for that matter) hear a story without the support of pictures, they naturally create mental images of characters, objects, and events, especially when the narrator uses rich, descriptive language. Then, when they want to recall a particular detail, they only have to draw on their own constructed mental image.
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Inspires Imagination & Creativity
Storytelling is interactive and co-creative. Your child becomes actively involved in the experience, rather than being a passive listener. In the absence of pictures, children automatically visualize their own images through which they develop a set of imagining skills necessary for becoming a successful reader.
What’s fascinating about this natural, taken-for-granted skill, is that it supports a child’s development of abstract thinking. It relies on your child’s understanding of story events to produce an image. Adults use this habit when they read novels.
Think about it this way: If you read a picture book to a group of children and then have them draw a picture of the story, those drawings will look quite similar as children rely on the pictures they’ve seen in the story to guide their efforts. But if you tell a story, which offers no pictorial reference, each of their drawings will be unique because they’ve relied on their creative mind’s eye to fill in those visual gaps.
When performed by creative and engaged adults, storytelling also models the imagination at work and inspires children to experiment with expression through language and movement.
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Supports a Variety of Learning Styles
Not every child can sit for 30 minutes and listen to a story. Some children require movement, natural surroundings, or a social context to focus and understand during learning activities. According to Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory, there are seven distinct modes of learning. While we assume all seven styles to some degree, one or two are naturally predominant within us. Storytelling supports children who learn about the world physically, needing to move, interact with objects and the environment, and role play.
Develops Social and Cultural Knowledge
Children have an innate tendency to imitate the actions and expressions of significant adults and will participate in stories that use a variety of entertaining gestures and expressions, especially if the narrator repeats them throughout the story. Through those encounters, children make meaning from voice inflections, such as rise and fall, emphasis, facial cues, and body language.
Deals With Complex Subjects
Unlike books, we can pull stories down from the sky with nothing more than inspiration. They’re an excellent solution for responding to a child’s difficult question, exploring a complex idea, or to discuss a challenging subject, such as the death of a pet, in the absence of the right book. Encourage your child to role-play different characters as a way of expressing the emotion surrounding a particular event.
How to Tell a Great Story
★ Use vocal inflection and body expression to give characters
personality. Involve your whole body in the telling the story.
★ Narrate slowly to give your child time to make meaning of events and
dialogue.
★ Encourage your child to join in by imitating voices or character
behaviours and predicting what will happen next.
★ Dramatize the story from your child’s favourite book, without using the
book. Choose a story that is simple enough to recall from memory
(chances are you know the story inside out already).
“Inside each of us is a natural-born storyteller, waiting to be released.”
Robin Moore, Author.
