“Three apples fell from the sky, one for the narrator, one for the listener, and one for the head of the story.” armenian proverb
Everyone loves a good story, whether it’s from a book, a storybook, or a movie. However, most people, children and adults alike, would say, “I don’t know how to tell stories.” The truth is that everyone can tell a story, they just need to know how. Telling stories is relatively easy because you don’t repeat the story word for word. When memorizing a poem or Scripture each word must be correct. A story requires two skills: memory and imagination. Both are skills that children have in abundance. Why not take advantage of that talent to teach your children to write?
If you want your kids’ writing to skyrocket, teach them to be storytellers. Just like reading, cooking, or working collaboratively with others, storytelling is a life skill. When your child gains the ability to tell stories in everyday circumstances, they will have a lasting legacy and will write more expressively, be attuned to the beauty of language, listen to others when they tell a good story, recognize good handwriting and think with more imagination.
Using storytelling in your homeschool brings much more than just the enjoyment of stories. You are giving your children a foundation in orality. Just as literacy is the ability to read and write, orality is the ability to speak and listen. The four modes (reading, writing, speaking and listening) constitute human communication. Orality supports literacy. Storytelling is the highest form of orality.
Usually, to help a child read and write better, we get them to do more of both, usually with some resistance. The most effective way to improve literacy is to increase oral language experiences such as storytelling, recitation, drama performance, to name a few. Storytelling is the best form of oral language experience because the storyteller internalizes a set of relationships and structures that he can then map back into the experience. Think of a fairy tale that you love. What does it show you? The value of being kind, the lowest usually rises to the top, the need for virtue and honesty, are just a few.
Orality takes the form of stories, rhymes, sayings, conversations and songs. Using oral language experiences with preschoolers is easy, since they are illiterate and in love with words. It’s so much fun to laugh with a young child and say a nonsense rhyme.
However, once children master reading, the focus tends to be on the printed word, and unfortunately speaking and listening begin to lag behind. To achieve their best in reading and writing, elementary students must continue to develop their oral speaking and listening skills.
How can I bring more orality to my homeschool?
Here are some simple, easy-to-do activities that require little to no preparation:
1. Read aloud to your children every day. Choose stories and books that have a strong plot and rich use of language. Avoid adaptations of familiar stories or books.
2. Use storytelling every day. Narration is the art of telling in your own words a passage that is read.
3. Do simple nursery rhymes and finger plays with your children. If you have older kids, teach them so they can play fingerplays with the little ones. You can find books on fingerplays and nursery rhymes in your library. Some popular rhymes include: “Jack and Jill”, “Hey, Diddle Diddle, the Cat and Fiddle”, “Little Miss Muffet” and “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”.
4. Make storytelling a special moment during the day or week. Use collections of folk tales or picture books that are retellings of folk tales and ask your elementary school children to learn how to tell them.
5. Tell stories about your own life. All children love to hear about when their parents were little.
6. Tell simple, familiar stories like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “Ten Little Monkeys.” See if your children can tell all or part of the story on their own.
What does all this have to do with writing?
If you want to help children improve their writing, do you make them write? Right? Wrong. When children are asked to write, they often struggle because they are being asked to perform two very different developmental tasks: writing and thinking spontaneously. One task at a time is usually not a problem; but, both at once require a certain amount of maturity. Start from a different point: try to have your child count instead of writing the sentence, paragraph or story.
The process
Here’s the process: compose orally, revise orally, then, and only then, write it down. At another time, ask your child to check for accuracy on grammar and punctuation, but definitely not when composing (orally or in writing). That’s it. It sounds simple, and it is. However, seeing results requires consistency and a light touch. Your child needs to get used to thinking out loud. He is patient and praises all efforts. Be sure to offer guidelines at the beginning, but don’t prompt with answers. There are no wrong answers with this approach, just good, better, and better. Let your child play from time to time and have them test the process.
If you’re ready to give the process a try, set the writing workbooks aside for a while (you can always come back to them later). The results will surprise you.
Learn more
To learn more about storytelling, check your library for the following books:
The Storyteller’s Starter Book: Finding, Learning, Interpreting, and Using Folktales: Including Twelve Tales That Can Be Told, Margaret Lee MacDonald
This is an easy to understand manual that helps you start counting.
Storyteller’s Path, ruth sawmill
This is a classic of narrative literature and one of my favorites that I go to for inspiration.
