Stories and Children are Inseparable

There is no one in the world who dislikes stories. This workshop showed how stories can be used effectively to bring about a great deal of unconscious learning among children.

The workshop conducted on the 8th Dec 2018, focused on the perspective and pedagogy of  storytelling at the preprimary level. The importance of storytelling  and how it could be used to make the classroom a space for fun and learning, was discussed.

A story book was given to all the teachers and one of them did a demo-class on storytelling. Using this as a basis for discussion, the following points were arrived at:

1. The teacher should be ready to use necessary body movements, facial reactions, voice modulations along with emotional expressions. This will help the children relate better with the characters in the story.
2. Before the actual storytelling, the teacher should read the story many times until she is comfortable with the flow of the story.
3. She should also practice the sounds of animals since children love to hear these sounds and this would encourage the active participation of even quieter students.
4. The teacher should also keep face masks and other TLMS, along with the story scenes in picture forms ready to help children imagine the scenes.
5. She should be prepared with the questions to ask during the story to help children understand the story and also to predict the next event. The questions should be such that it makes children think and relate with the characters in the story. However the teacher should be careful not to ask too many questions or questions that would disturb the flow or divert the children’s attention away from the story.

There was also a short discussion on the difference between storytelling and story reading. Storytelling a tool for creating interest in reading. The teacher can give children pictures of the main characters of the story with their names written under, for colouring. These can be then pasted on the classroom walls. Children will start reading the names of the characters unconsciously even before they know the letters of the alphabet and this is called graphical reading. Seating arrangements, voice modulation, focusing on punctuation, holding the book in such a way that everyone can see, etc. were some of the other points that were discussed.

The workshop offered ideas as to how the storytelling and its related activities could be planned across 5 days.

Day 1: Storytelling with gestures, facial expressions and a lot of interaction.

Day 2: Story reading with emotions and intonations, pointing out the words and the associated pictures.

Day 3 to Day 5: Reinforcing story reading and activities related to the story which lead to greater learning. Eg. Colouring outline images of the same story and writing the names of the characters (Guess reading and writing).

The workshop concluded with the assurance that I the above indicators were followed, then by the end of the week, children would be able to read and narrate the story by looking at the pictures.