Telling a story to our children is simple. Reading it or narrating it without a book, we will make you live a thousand adventures and develop your imagination. But there are ways and ways to tell a story. How will we know that we are telling you a story well? Here you have some clues.
Our ancestors had much better developed than us the ability to tell. Today, our way of life has relegated the oral expression of stories to the background, and we don't always have the gift of the word. It doesn't matter, let's take a book and rely on it.
But, with or without a book, we have to look at the child's attitude, how he is receiving the message. A child who enjoys the story, shows us that:
- He wants to know more. The story does not always end when the book is closed. Find alternative endings.
- Listen attentively, expectantly for what will happen on the next page, but ...
- Interrupts us when he considers it necessary, because he doesn't understand something, because he wants to know more, because he wants to give us his point of view on the specific episode ...
- He wants to see the drawings, in the case of illustrated books.
- He keeps the book and reviews it, he "reads" it in his own way after having heard the story.
- Draw what happened in the story, or its characters (sometimes we just need to propose it).
- He wants to play the hero or heroine of the story. Or the antagonist, what else does it matter.
- He remembers the story in other situations.
- The story is believed: We tell it by giving particular voices to the different characters, we use onomatopoeia, we gesticulate… There is nothing worse than a child yawning or distracted while telling a story. Isn't it that we are doing it monotonous?
- Gesture with us, talk to the characters, mimic the onomatopoeia.
- He wants us to tell him the same story, over and over again. Incidentally, we accelerate the acquisition of vocabulary of the child, although we do not let him miss new adventures.
Having said all this, I cannot conclude without saying that to tell stories you learn with practice, and that children will enjoy from the first moment to listen to these stories from their parents, even before they understand them.
Therefore always I encourage you to tell stories to your children, better or worse, and that these lines help you to give them a special touch and give you ideas to make the story not stay in a mere reading.
