So how often do you engage in story telling to your children?!
Hands up?? Rarely As responsible parents, how often do you indulge in storytelling with your children? The answer, these days, may be rarely or never. Nowadays, with the tremendous amount of pressure on young parents, like the complexities of a nuclear family, lesser amount of free time available, and the addiction towards technological gadgets, the art of storytelling for kids is somewhere getting lost.
Storytelling forms a crucial part in developing your child’s overall personality. It is an age-old tradition followed by parents since time immemorial that has been a part of most of our own childhood too.
Story telling in its simplistic form is the art of reading a book out loud with you child. In our children’s yoga classes we often read from books or yoga cards and use visual tools and poses to recreate the story together. It can also be sharing a memory together or even reading from your phone! The benefits for toddlers and pee schools in particular.
top ten reasons why story telling should be part of your daily routine:
1. We will have all experienced at some point our child wanting to be just like their favourite character in the book. Stories often have hidden messages, which you can use to play to your child’s strengths such as courage,
2. Children are often curious of new words in books and like to be told the meanings. A child can often relate to the words better when a story’s narrated and retains the information much better.
3. Studies show that infancy is when a child retains the most amount of words, this is why story telling should be a huge part of your little ones routine. More often than not when they are younger they like to talk rather than listen however story telling helps equip them by creating a habit of listening to stories is inculcated in them, they learn to become better listeners. It provides them the necessary training to listen and understand more, instead of talking. In a Kalma childrens yoga class we start stories from our baby classes so the use of language in our classes is implemented from an early age.
4. Children can become educated in cultural roots through story telling and learn about heritage. It can help children understand and learn to love what they find out! During our Kalma Junior children’s yoga class we often go for adventures during weeks such as Easter or Chinese New Year in which children can use their imagination in our stories in the session.
5. Story telling can vastly improve memory. A child often asks questions through a story and this process of questioning will help the child retain the information.
6. Story telling Inspires imagination in children. It encourages the child to think freely as the ask questions and form their own characters and ideas about plots.
7. Children can relate to characters along with their emotions in story telling using imagination. Emotions are real in story telling and children can empathise with characters. They often remember how such events in life made them feel and can use what they have learned in a character to apply their own emotions. Books often help them express their emotions easily.
8. A story can help children learn better in school by supporting the understanding on a particular subject. Children can relate their learning to individual subjects and also use their imagination.
9. Sharing a story with cultural plots can help a child’s understanding of the world there fore Broadens their horizons. Through the use of a story a child can be educated on what happens across the worlds in other countries.
10. Story telling can help empower communication. It can support a child to ask the right kind of questions. It helps to stroke the right communication in the form of questioning and answering.