Storytelling is an ancient yet powerful form of teaching, prevalent for centuries. It involves the delivery of a story orally from a book, the internet, or even from memory. It can be any kind of story: romantic, fantasy, even scary ones! The flexibility of expression and thought it offers is what makes it such an integral part of children’s early life, who are thoroughly entertained.

What seems like a simple pleasure of childhood actually contributes the most to a child’s skills, mental and emotional development, and overall personality. Let’s see what the benefits are:

 

Improves Verbal Skills

When toddlers listen to storytellers, they hear unique words and interesting inflections of speech. They grow curious about such things; best case scenario is that they’ll even speak up to ask their meaning. Even the simple act of wondering about a new word, pronunciations or phrase helps expand their vocabulary. They become more fluent in their speaking and grammatical skills.

 

Improves Memory

Storytelling does not use illustrations of characters or scenery – but that is not a bad thing! In fact, it promotes children to remember the names of characters or plot points. This perfects their fact retention and memory skills from a young age. Teachers in early learning centres can take this a step further by asking questions after a story has finished, allowing their memory to be practically perfected. This also exposes children to literary devices like plot twists, characterisations, and more.

 

Promotes Imagination and Creativity

When a child is listening to a story without any visual assistance, they often have to make up the entire story in their own minds, – like their own movie. Imagining characters, places and plot improves their imaginative ideas and creative thinking. “A child’s memory capacity is enhanced when he/ she is asked to remember something from a story,” says Niranjan Jha, a human resource personnel from Vasant Vihar.

 

Assists Cultural and Moral Understanding

Storytelling indirectly promotes cultural understanding among children. Listening to regional stories helps enhance a child’s curiosity to explore their own and others’ cultures. They learn about different traditions, ideas, experiences and more, thereby broadening their horizons.

Children also learn moral lessons through stories – after all, if they like a character from some book, they want to be like them. Teachers therefore have to pick well-crafted, morally high stories to narrate, so that children learn qualities like empathy, courage, and honesty from an early age. This helps shape their personalities into compassionate beings.

Teachers in early learning centres make it a duty to choose the rise story for children’s entertainment and benefit. Nurseries in Barsha Heights like Oakfield Early Learning Centre have separate Library Rooms with an educational software installed that enhance the entire storytelling experience for the child. They are spacious enough to share stories in all kinds of ways – riddles, rhymes, singing and more. The teachers’ policy at Oakfield is simple: make sure every child attains skills needed to become confident people.

By now, we can safely say that teachers play as much a major role as parents when it comes to a child’s literacy development. After all, who said storytelling has to be restricted at the home?