Children love to be read stories and it truly creates a wonderful experience every time we can introduce our children to the number of rich children’s literature available. Capturing your children’s interest is not just about the easy story we can find to share but, our enthusiasm in how it is read to our young. Young children can be restless and so engaging them into the story as much as possible teaches our children how to increase their attention span so that the stories can become longer and more complex. As they are looking at the illustrations they are learning to pay attention to detail and in noticing these details with provided clues they are honing in on their visual discrimination skills and preparing your children’s eyes to recognize letters, numbers and formations and the difference between the letters and words. When we read and our children listen we help develop their auditory skills to accurately process and communicate their spoken language, and re-enforce word recognition through repetition. Sometimes it’s fun to make these stories up! Here’s how the Home Story Technique can help you all as a family feel confident in reading and that will instill the love of books and storytelling into your family.
What You Need:
- Time is the first thing, so whether this is done as part of your bedtime ritual or over the weekends as a family, it is a unique bonding experience to allow you all to become familiar with sharing your story and developing our children’s imaginations.
- Have your children collect several items around the home; of course, safe and appropriate items for the age of the child.
- Once your children have collected several items have each child place the items in the middle of the desired space where you will be telling the story.
- Now create a circle or triangle that allows you all to have eye contact with one another.
- Flip a coin to decide who goes first and so forth in choosing the items in the middle. So, if there are 4 children and 12 items each one gets 3 each. If all your children are new to this then you as a parent will be the first to start off the stories but, if others are joining in for the first time then they will be the last and get to watch for others that have the experience.
- The first person will start the story and incorporate all of their objects before moving onto the next person. Remember, when telling your story, you can now move away from the circle to incorporate adventure. Perhaps you are climbing through a rainforest or swimming across a lake. All movement and actions will need space. Alternatively, you can do one round of stories using one item each and then continue the story moving onto the second set of objects that have already been collected.
Copywritten by Jo Frost
