The Art of Storytelling (Early Childhood Educators)

Explains the importance of Storytelling and how to develop and plan relevant classroom activities around one story, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"

Learning through play and exploration encourages communication, improves cognitive development in children.

See a demo on Story Narration. Observe how to narrate a story in your own words & get children attention by engaging them while telling the story

Title of the story: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Author of the story: Eric Carle

Lesson learned from the story: We should eat healthy food and avoid unhealthy food

Learn about the five basic elements of a story and how to create a story around these elements.

Greater understanding of effective Storytelling techniques in classrooms/home while telling a story.

Learn about different methods of Storytelling and classroom activities for preschoolers and Kindergarten children.

See how the storytelling picture sequencing cards can be used in a group activity in the classroom.

The educator sets up 4 learning stations with 4 children in each group.

In this demo, I am using felt board, animals, trees, pond, duck etc. made using felt fabric. Since I had family sticks puppets, I tried including characters of Mom, Dad & children.

I am narrating a story - Day at the Zoo in my own words.

Classroom set up play an important role in learning, in early years. One needs to make sure the classroom environment is productive and has a positive vibe.

Forest is one of the setups for Storytelling where you can introduce different types of animals and their names. As the story progresses, you can talk about their sounds and other physical characteristics. It is very important that your class setup meets your story content.

Halloween is one of the day children celebrate with lots of fun, dress up in costumes, go trick or treating. They also carve jack-o-lanterns from pumpkins by hallowing it. Some children enjoy carving and decorating these pumpkins by making scary faces and putting candles and lights inside it. They love doing this and have a great time with friends in evening, when they all go for trick or treating in the neighbourhood.

Construction theme is usually done when you want to talk about construction workers and use of different types of vehicles. The set up can be created using construction vehicles, people and material like sand, pebbles and stone etc. Children can also be involved in creating this theme and its wonderful to see them getting excited about bringing bob the builder toys to the classroom. They can also draw the pictures of these vehicles using their creativity.

Christmas is celebrated in almost every part of the world. Children love decorating the Christmas tree with the ornaments they have made at home or in their classrooms. They get into the festive mood and wait for the Santa Claus with excitement. This is one of my favorite theme for classrooms, which I do before children go for Christmas break.

This is a setup which can be created in your classroom or at home and a story can be made around it. There are very interesting elements like pond, fisherman, house, boy, duck, cat etc. in this setup.

The educator/parent narrates the story in her own words using garden as the setting and all these elements.

Props are used as aid in telling a story. You can make your own props using any type of material or buy from stores to save your time. Children like making these props and it helps them in improving their imaginary and creative skills. Props can be maps, cookies, flowers, table cloth, toys, stone, anything that helps in telling a story.

Here I have demonstrated how to make use of these creative props for the theme:

--> Farm Animals

--> In the Ocean

--> A Puppet show