Useful, actionable ways to prompt rich storytelling in your Early Years classroom.
There are many different ways to encourage rich storytelling in early childhood.
Studies show the development of strong oral language skills strongly influences a child's ability to write well later but, as a teacher, I often see children draw a blank when asked to tell or write a story.
Thankfully there are many ways through play and classroom invitations to empower young children to become capable, confident storytellers.
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While reading provides a library of storytelling material for preschoolers, pretend play is perfect for building narratives. Whether it be dinosaurs, animals, fairies or people, children can make believe and start to tell their own stories during play. Just a handful of things either found or purchased can spark such rich imaginative play.
Story stones are a favourite DIY resource of mine and are ideal for storytelling and easy to make. You can just use stickers or print our pictures to use. You can find out how we make ours in this post.
Dress-ups or puppets are another way to develop storytelling skills. Both allow children to step into the role of other characters. They can collaborate to retell familiar and unfamiliar stories in a way that encourages activity.
Many of these activities are favourites among the preschool crowd and are great activities to add to literacy centres in those first weeks of school. Focusing on building oral language skills before written work, activities such as these also help build communication between the small groups of children, many who might still be learning how to work together co-operatively.
Another favourite activity are these 'Tell Me A Story' cards. Designed to make differentiation easy between groups, I created them with different levels of support and expectations of task.
For those pre-writers, they can just 'tell' each other the story but for the beginning writers, they can start recording their story.
For older more capable writers, I provide a different sheet with more space for their writing and room for an illustration.
My students love trying to make the silliest stories they can with these. One minute there's hula-hooping dinosaurs on school buses and next there's unicorns on the moon eating too much icecream. You can see why this proves to be irresistible to 6 and 7 year olds!
Want to create your own writing center in class or at home? Grab our Tell Me A Story pack!
This is a digital product, no physical item will be posted to you.
If you're looking for more ideas to use in class or at home, I highly recommend the book 'Show Me A Story' by Emily K Neuburger. I bought it years ago and it's full of simple inspirational projects you can do to engage children in rich storytelling.
