Storytelling

Listening to, telling and re-telling stories enables children to make more sense of the world around them, to share experiences with one another and to develop their imagination and creativity. Storytelling helps to improve pupils’ speaking and listening skills and to increase motivation for reading and written work. It encourages pupils to see events from different perspectives. With the bedtime story fast becoming an endangered species, schools are well-placed to encourage children to tell stories in the hope that their enthusiasm will rub off on their parents.

How do you do it?

Storytelling can be used as a stand-alone activity or combined with other drama strategies. A good place to start is by telling stories to your pupils and encouraging them to share stories with one another. All of us can become engaging storytellers with a little practice. There may also be members of staff who are particularly skilled at telling stories, or you could invite a professional storyteller into the school. Listen to each other, watch videos of storytelling and encourage the children to identify techniques they could use in their own stories. Rather than learning stories by rote pupils should identify key images and important moments, and retell the story in their own words. Still images can be used to mark out those key moments, as can drawing storyboards and story maps or (for younger children) sorting pictures into the right order. It is well worth playing some games to develop oral skills and get the creative juices flowing. These can help to develop vocabulary, story-making and storytelling techniques.

Begin with some word association games like Word Tennis and One word at a time stories.

Word Tennis

In this word-association game, pupils have to keep thinking up words in a chosen category and ‘bat’ them to each other. Whoever repeats a word or can’t think of one is out, and somebody else takes his or her place. You can demonstrate with two students and then play it in pairs or teams of four or five students. Each team should form a line facing another team. The two students at the head of each line play each other until one of them can’t think of a word – or repeats an earlier word. That person goes to the back of the line and the next student takes their place.

Categories can include colours, fruit, sea creatures, flavours of ice cream, fairy tale characters, sports, adverbs, adjectives and so on. Change the categories as often as you need to maintain interest. Students will soon come up with their own interesting suggestions for new categories.