Once upon a time, a pirate helped some kids with fun, learning and kindergarten readiness. How? By telling stories. While there are great books to read with kids all about pirates, we often forget that we can just tell stories. Plus, it’s important to encourage kids to make up stories and tell them to us too.
As adults, we take the basic structure of a story for granted but children are only beginning to understand that stories have a beginning, middle and end sequence. Some of them have dialogue. Stories are usually built around one event or idea. When you tell your child a story you will use this same structure even if you are not aware of doing so. As with so many things, kids need to experience this same pattern over and over before it gets recorded into their thinking strategies.
Telling stories instead of reading them gives kids a chance to make the pictures in their own heads instead of putting the book’s pictures in their minds. This is called visualizing. Creating pictures also exercises their imaginations, plus they link words and images using context and language. You model for your little one how to think on one’s feet and build on resources that are immediately available. It’s much less scary to have an adventure in a story. Telling stories or hearing them is one way to deal with emotions. Stories give lots of practice with language.
These are just a few of the ways that telling stories promotes development and kindergarten readiness. Pirates are an exciting idea for a story. What stories about pirates can you and your child tell?