Story telling is an art that has mental, social and educational benefits on children. People of all ages love stories. Children are great fans of stories and love to listen to them. Storytelling literally means reading out stories to them or just telling a story from the memory to them. It is becoming a lost art today as many parents find very little time to spend with kids as the hustle and bustle of life demands them to reserve more time for the needs of life.
Storytelling is a great activity of learning. At each phase of the development of the story, kids ask questions. A proper teller can use tricks to make them curios and encourage them to ask questions. Storytelling is the basic training for academic learning. When they see images in the book and listen to the stories, kids learn to associate between images and story and later imagination and visuals.
You can increase the memory capacity of children by asking them to remember the stories you have already read for them or asking them to remember where you stopped the previous day. Always demand kids to share their contribution in the stories. Ask them to narrate a possible climax or encourage them to create a new story with the same characters in a story. Imagination is the key to creativity and children can be trained in many ways to develop stronger skills of imagination.
The most bulging benefit of storytelling is increased knowledge in children. They get to know about various places, practices in life, relationships etc., through stories. Most of the stories depict good and bad characters. Listening to stories will help children to have an idea of accepted style of behaviors and must to avoid acts. Stories also allow children to know about their own cultural roots.
Differences between cultures and various lifestyles are introduced to kids through stories. All the stories are informative to children, as being new to the world; they may know very little things about the life in the world. Stories help kids to visualize the plot and characters.
Another advantage of listening to stories is that children grow in academic learning. Story telling introduces lot of new vocabulary to children. At homes, people communicate with limited number of words. But stories will have academic level vocabulary and lot of newer words for the kid to learn. It is easy to teach the meanings of the words as kids learn faster from the context of story.
Infancy is the period when children absorb most of the words they use in the future. Story telling also encourages children to participate actively in the learning process. It can enhance the listening skills of children. Kids love to talk instead of listening to anything. But this is not acceptable in the classrooms, thus storytelling gives them with the necessary training to listen and understand instead of talking.
Parents need to take care of certain aspects when reading out stories for children. If you want kids to listen actively and understand the story, you have to read out the stories emotionally. Change the pitch of sound according to the feelings and emotions depicted in the story. Use effective body language to convey ideas in the exact way. Perfect storytelling is acting out a story. Storytelling parents are found to have more emotional bond with the children. It teaches the children to be creative and make them dynamic thoughts and action.
Source: http://www.prokerala.com/kids/activities/storytelling-to-children.php
