When you talk about reading strategies in emergent literacy, whole language or any of the reading strategy approaches for young preschoolers and kindergarten children one of the best ones is no doubt storytelling.

When an adult tells stories the children are usually riveted by the mystery and suspense of the story and the children who don’t have great attention spans usually can sit through a good story. The children are also learning lots of new language as the story is being told.

What would be really great would be to teach the children story skills themselves.

Having the children learn to tell stories helps them develop their thinking skills and its a fun way to get them thinking.

Here are a few ways to get started thinking about how to get the children thinking.

1. Make a spider web with the children.Draw a web and put a word in the middle, for example FALL. The children can think of words associated with that word, in this case fall and you put the words around the web on cards with paper clips.
2. Use different methods to tell stories to the children. Puppets, flannel boards, magnetic pictures on a sheet, chalkboards, white boards or you can even paint a story.
3. Use story cans with objects inside the cans. Sit the children in a circle. Each child selects and object, and tells part of the story that includes that object. You start the story yourself with an object from the can.
4. Encourage creativity by changing old time favorite. See how you change the 3 little bears and little read riding hood with the children themselves.
5. As you tell a story have the children tell you “one more thing that happened”
6. Use problem solving sills as you ask them questions about the story like “what if?” or What happened then”
7. Use objects and visual aids to help act out the story as you tell it.
8. Have the children make up their own stories, dictate them to you and then you read them to the whole class.

An activity that is very popular especially among the home schooling crowd is the making of lap books. Some children create lap books out of the subject matter they are learning and these books are  very helpful for story telling. As in the case of the child who used to make a colonial lap book as part of a reading strategy