Storytelling
Storytelling has multiple benefits for children. Some of these include fluency, comprehension, language, communication, conversational skills, etc. Thus, children should have time to explore storytelling and gain experience telling stories. However, there are two problems that arise.
1) There is not time allotted for storytelling during the school day. Students do a lot of reading, listening to stories, as well as writing stories, but there is not a lot of time to tell stories orally.
2) There are multiple types of storytelling, but not all types are understood and celebrated. The European-American style of storytelling is what is known and common. This type of story is about one topic, has a beginning, middle, end with a problem and a solution. However, there are multiple different types of stories that are celebrated by other cultures.
As teachers, we need to acknowledge that every culture has a different form of storytelling that embraces that cultures values and beliefs. One way that we can embrace each cultures' storytelling abilities is by creating more time for children to tell stories. Every child has a story to tell, let's open our ears, just as we open their eyes to new books.
1) There is not time allotted for storytelling during the school day. Students do a lot of reading, listening to stories, as well as writing stories, but there is not a lot of time to tell stories orally.
2) There are multiple types of storytelling, but not all types are understood and celebrated. The European-American style of storytelling is what is known and common. This type of story is about one topic, has a beginning, middle, end with a problem and a solution. However, there are multiple different types of stories that are celebrated by other cultures.
- African-American culture
- Latino culture
- Japanese culture
As teachers, we need to acknowledge that every culture has a different form of storytelling that embraces that cultures values and beliefs. One way that we can embrace each cultures' storytelling abilities is by creating more time for children to tell stories. Every child has a story to tell, let's open our ears, just as we open their eyes to new books.
McCabe, A. (1992). All kinds of good stories. Retrieved from http://blackboard.jcu.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-129398-dt-content-rid-483392_1/courses/ED-565-1-201230/Course Documents(3)/Socio-cultural Perspective AlyssaMcCabe_AllKindsOfGoodStories/McCabearticle.pdf