Storytelling Steps

One of the best stealth learning "tricks" I know is to play games with kids. There are myriad games that are excellent, and playing ANY game with a child is beneficial for them in many ways: learning to take turns, count correctly, win and lose gracefully, learning colors, numbers, and anything else the game holds. Joy loves to play games, and we play them with her often. A few weeks ago, I was looking for a small game to take with us on our vacation, something we could play in the airplane (few pieces to get lost!).

Tell Tale by Blue Orange is what I found, and it is a FUN game packed into a small container! Joy LOVES it, and we continue to play it almost every day. It's such a simple concept, you could easily make it at home if you didn't want to pay for the packaged version. It has a bunch of small cards that have pictures on them... Pictures of people (and monsters and critters), places, and intriguing props for the telling of stories. You could just cut pictures from magazines and get the same kind of materials for storytelling!

You simply take out a number of random cards (we usually use 5 or 6), put them in any order you want, and tell a story about the pictures! It's so easy, a very young child could do it. But it's so intriguing, it makes adults want to tell stories, too!

Joy wants us to play this game with her constantly. What she doesn't know is that by telling stories and hearing stories, she is learning the art of writing! I do not turn this into a lecture, but after playing for a couple of weeks now, I started pointing out some very basic writing concepts, like:

A) My main character stays the main character throughout the whole story;

B) There is a problem in my story, and by the end of the story, the problem is solved somehow; and

C) The story usually goes in chronological (time) order.



We're not writing these stories down! These are just oral stories so far, but someday I expect that we'll begin writing some of them down. I could certainly envision Joy dictating a story for me to type, even now. There is no testable goal at this time, either. We're simply building the framework for reading and writing fiction stories by talking about the stories. There is no special vocabulary or any secret formula; Simply engage your child in creating and talking about stories.

Don't expect your child's stories to keep the same main character, have a coherent problem, go in chronological order, or even to make sense at first! Their skill will develop as they experience your stories and their stories and authors' stories.  And just like Joy IS a scientist when we do science, she IS an author when she makes up stories. Giving your child the title as they begin to explore a subject empowers them to take risks and ACT like an author (or a scientist, or a mathematician).