Since the beginning of our human journey, we have been storytellers.
Stories help us to learn who we are and to better understand others both near and far.
Storytelling has its own power and significance in learning to talk, to think, to know, and to interact with the world.
Storytelling and story reading go hand in hand. Children need to achieve oral competence with the language they will meet in print. Teaching the storytelling way moves learners from listening to speaking. When we teach children to retell a story, we provide a scaffold to reading a story, reading variations of a story, and reading stories that link with and extend the content and ideas carried within an oral story. It is from this hierarchical experience and skills development that we can then best instruct and coach our children in crafting writing and bring them to the challenge of writing with greater ease and confidence.
In a storytelling classroom, teachers are storytellers and children become storytellers.
At StoryWays Literacy, our goal is to support excellence in the craft of literacy teaching.
Here is one of our six-year-old storytellers from a storytelling classroom.
WHY TEACH THE STORYTELLING WAY
