Avoid Tall Tales: Tips for Telling Great Children’s Stories

by Oye Akintan on May 19, 2022

In the beginning, our parents and grandparents told us stories that left a lasting impression on us. Sometimes, these stories were powerful and meaningless, but they were always fascinating. Do you remember how much you enjoyed storytime with your parents and grandparents? Did you ever wonder why their impact was so lasting?

The Importance of Children’s Stories

Reading encourages kids' development and creates a stronger connection between you. It also does the following:

  • Improves key areas like memory and language skills and sparks curiosity, which increases the child’s imaginative skills.
  • It gives them new perceptions of the world around them every time they read a story, making them more well-rounded. You can find books from many different cultures, which will expand their minds. 
  • Reading with your kids is fun to spend quality time together, whether through store-bought books or homeschooling resources.

Tips for Telling Great Children’s Stories

We’ve got five tips for you today on how you can tell memorable, meaningful stories to your kids, whether it’s for recreation or through homeschooling resources. These tips also segregate the type of tales you can share:

  • Experiences: Sometimes, the best stories don’t come from library books or homeschooling resources; they come from someone’s life experiences. If you want to improve relationships with their family members, sharing stories about your relatives is excellent. Tell them about their grandparents and the grandparents before them, too. These tales can also overlap with the first two options since they refer to a character’s history.
  • Child’s Interest: Think about what your kid loves and base your story nights on that.
  • If they love dogs, get stories about dogs.
  • If they have a pet, find stories based on a pet or animal similar to the one you have and change the animal's name to the pet’s name in the report.
  • If your kid loves a specific character from a TV show, find some stories that are similar to that character.
  • Cultural Tales: You can use folktales from other cultures to share with your children, pointing out the significant differences in each story as you go along. For instance, One Thousand and One Nights falls under the first category while also being a collection of Arabian folktales that reinvented the genre. It was the first kind of literature to feature the story-within-a-story plot device.
  • Tales That Turn Back Time: Think about the stories you heard as a child; pass that feeling on to your child. Why have they been told and re-told so many times? What makes these stories so familiar? Sometimes, these are classics that have been passed on from generation to generation, whether through books or homeschooling resources.
  • Literary Classics: If you could pick out any stories from your childhood, be it about animals, Christmas, or stories with a moral, what would those stories be?

Pick one of those stories and read it to your kid because you will probably share a few of those tastes with your child. For instance, Aesop’s Fables contain multiple tales that impart essential life lessons in each conclusion. Most characters are everyday creatures such as a hare, tortoise, and goose!

Conclusion

If you want children to be more invested in storytime, ask them to list stories they think they will like, such as the stories found in books and movies. Bring them to the library or a bookstore to make their selections. When choosing the material, they will feel more involved with what you are saying. Try this out. Maybe it will help!

You can also get pertinent homeschooling resources like these from Kids Plenty today! We provide parents with next-gen technology such as augmented reality and picture books that educate, entertain, and empower their children. Buy from our website now!

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