STORYTELLING IN THE CLASSROOM

Why use stories with your students?

o Stories help bind people together, forge group identities and create a sense of common culture
and understanding.
o As people listen to stories, they form images in their minds that are stored in the memory as
symbols.
o The mental images created through storytelling stimulates appropriate neural development in
the brain.
o When children share the stories they have learned or create, they experience the joy of knowing
that they carry the knowledge within themselves that will hold the attention of others without
using television, video games or computers!
o Stories convey the most profound of life's lessons.
o Stories are also effective in increasing tolerance and understanding of people from other
cultures.
o Storytelling can promote social competence by showing the young people which qualities cause
relationships to thrive and which actions sow distrust and discord.
o Stories allow listeners to explore sensitive issues in a safe and non-threatening way.
o Storytelling stimulates the imagination.
o Storytelling builds resiliency because it provides appropriate models for behaviour and reminds
young people that they are not alone in their struggles and their pain.
o Storytelling can encourage sts to explore their unique expressiveness.

Listening to stories as they are told by Learning to tell stories to others:

another: o Improves oral language skills
o Develops listening skills o Improves story writing
o Increases concentration o Develops the sts’ understanding of plot
o Develops vocabulary and a sense of story and sequence
o Motivates students to read o Encourages reading and critical thinking
o Can be a vivid experience skills.

Classroom storytelling activities:

1. Tell and re-tell
Teacher tells (or reads) a story to class. Individuals re-tell the same story in pairs, in small groups, or
to the whole class.
2. Tell a familiar story from another perspective.
3. Tell a personal story.
4. Tell "whoppers" or tall tales. Who can tell the wildest tale? This is especially useful for primary
children who may be reluctant tellers.
5. Conduct interviews with well-known story characters.
6. Create your own stories following the typical format of a folk tale.
7. Map out the main events that occur in a story to aid in the telling.
8. Give the students a story outline (story map) and have them tell it filling out the details to make
the story more interesting.
9. Make a bulletin board display of:
• story openings "Once upon a time..." • magic spells
• heroes/heroines • story endings
• villains
10. Examine different kinds of stories: fables, legends, fairy tales etc.
11. Challenge students to learn a story that someone in the family remembers from childhood.
12. Have a multicultural festival, learning and telling stories from many cultures.
13. Integrate stories from other cultures.
14. Find several versions of the same story.
 TPRS: TPR storytelling is a method for teaching foreign languages that was invented by Blain
Ray in 1990. He found that changing from commands to the third person singular allowed him to
tell stories. He found that asking sts to act out the parts of the characters in the stories preserve the
highly effective physical element that had been powerful in TPR.
TPRS begins with the introduction of vocabulary and complex structures. The T asks the story
using a questioning technique called circling. The first two steps are followed up with reading; and
sts acquire the 2L effortlessly and involuntarily.
The method relies on the 5 hypothesis of the Natural Approach: the acquisition hypothesis, the
input h, the natural order h, the affective filter h, and the monitor h.
The number one, most important element in any TPRS program is the quantity and quality of
the unconditional love, positive feedback, pats on the back and hearty applause provided to the sts
by the T.