What are the benefits of Storytelling in Primary Education?

What are the benefits of storytelling in primary education?
‘Storytelling is the oldest form of education’ (Hamilton and Weiss, 2005, P1) it’s a way of communicating and passing on key ideas, beliefs, traditions and history. Through use in primary education, it can stimulate and motivate learning whilst improving imagination, reading, creativity and many other skills in children’s development. It’s also a way for children to understand their surroundings and make meaning by mentally constructing stories (Hamilton and Weiss, 2005). It can enhance progress in creativity and problem solving by allowing children to explore stories by adapting them or by making up their own. It can be used 
Storytelling is vastly different from just ‘story reading’. With storytelling, it can create a community and an ‘in the moment’ audience which is interactive and therefore flexible. The teller can adapt and change the direction of the story depending on the audience’s reactions or expressions. For example if the children are showing signs of becoming scared the teller can tone it down a bit, whereas if the children are loving the more gory and thriller details then more can be added in as the story progresses. 
Storytelling can also be used in the classroom, through the use of story sacks. This is an interactive and exciting way for the children to experience storytelling. Story sacks are usually a range of items in a bag that support a particular book. It will include a copy of the book, some small soft toy or characters from the story, a CD or tape recording of the story and/or relates rhymes and songs and a non-fiction book that relates to the theme of the story (Frome & Somerset Standard, 2012). Chatter boxes are another type of product that encourages storytelling. These are usually made from any reasonably tough box (e.g. shoebox) with the inside of the box ‘landscaped’ and equipped appropriately to fit the story. Children are able to interact with this and re-enact the story in different ways to create plot twits or different endings. The box doesn’t necessarily have to be book-related but as long it promotes children to use their imagination and tell and develop the stories it can be successful (Barron, & Powell, 2002). They also help to encourage cross curricular learning, as can be used not only in literacy but other subjects like science and maths (McLeish, 2012). This is something that Donaldson (2015) thinks is important in his review for the new Welsh curriculum as he considers all learning to be holistic and interconnected.
The benefits of using these types of resources when storytelling include developing the children’s social skills, imagination skills, narrative skills, teamwork skills, organisation and responsibility and many more (Bredgaard, 2014). They can also use these methods to try and make a sense of reality and ‘real world’ through play and recreation. (Sargent, 2014). Hamilton and Weiss (2005, P2) backs this and says that ‘Storying, the process of constructing stories in the mind, is one of the fundamental ways of making meaning and thus pervades all aspects of learning, regards less of age.’ 
During one of our seminars we took part in picking and showing our story sacks to another group. This enabled us to have a hands on experience with the story sacks and see what could and was included in them. Our story was about frogs so for background ambience we added subtle frogs sounds. This would help the children to really become part of the story. The soft toy was used to demonstrate what the frog in the book was doing and then after used a communication tool, so that when holding it you could ask and add a comment to the group discussion. We thought this could open up about different colours and the emotions and words attached to them (for example, blue – sad, cold and green, nature). 


Overall, storytelling has a lot of positive ways of being explored and used in the classroom and should motivate children to enjoy and take pleasure from reading or writing stories themselves. With so many ways of going about storytelling it’s something that can be used not just in literacy or at the end of a school day (although that is a good place to start) but something used in lessons too.

 References:
Barron, I. & Powell, J. (2002) Story Sacks, Children's Narratives and the Social Construction of Reality. Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, 5(3), pp.129–137. 
Bredgaard, S. (2014) The Story Sack Project: A Flagship Project for the School, Wanborough: School Library Association.
Donaldson, G. (2015) Successful Futures Independent Review of Curriculum and Assessment Arrangements in Wales. Available at: http://gov.wales/docs/dcells/publications/150225-successful-futures-en.pdf(Accessed on 5th May 2019).
Frome & Somerset Standard, (2012) Story sacks help bring children's books to life, Bath: MGN Ltd.
Hamilton, M. and Weiss, M. (2005) The Power of Storytelling in the classroom,  Available online at: https://www.rcowen.com/PDFs/CTS%20Ch%201%20for%20website.pdf(Accessed on 5th May 2019).
McLeish, J. (2012) Science sparks young minds. The Times Educational Supplement Scotland, (2266), P22.
Sargent, M. (2014) The little book of story bags, London: Bloomsbury


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