Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Do you ever feel like your child gets ‘stuck’ on some sounds or words? That they can’t get their message across as easily as they should?
Does your child have difficulty telling you about their day? Their response may be something like, “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember” or they may not be able to tell you anything at all.
Partnerships with therapists
Storytelling skills are important for:
Social relationships and our ability to connect with others. Sharing personal stories is a big part of our everyday social interactions and helps us to develop and maintain friendships.
- Self-esteem and self-awareness. Personal stories add meaning to our lives and help create our identifies.
Storytelling can be a challenge for children with communication and learning difficulties. They may struggle to choose a specific event to share with others because their day was filled with multiple activities, or they may not have the skills to tell a short story. Story telling places huge demands on their attention skills, their ability to recall information and their ability to formulate sentences using correct words and grammar. It also requires sequencing skills, understanding of cause and effect and perspective taking.
A child with weak narrative skills may:
- Jump around within the story.
- Skip important details.
- Go off on tangents.
- Go on and on about something.
- Have difficulty knowing where to start. They may start telling a story without giving the listener enough information to set the scene.
What can you do to help?
1. Use visuals. Visuals can include:
- Objects you collect during your activity (e.g. shells from the beach).
- Photos or videos that you take during the activity.
- Hand drawn pictures of the activity.
2. Use scaffolds. A scaffold can look something like this image.
You can write your child’s story down for them and ask them to draw pictures to go with it or have them stick photos next to the text.
Encourage your child to use sequencing words such as first, then, next, last, before and after to show the sequence in which things happened.
Additional Tips
Lastly, don’t forget to provide opportunities for your child to practice their story telling skills. The more the better! They can tell their story to a family member or friend in person or via Face Time.
Their stories can be about:
- Family outings (e.g. trip to the zoo).
- Activities (e.g. baking cookies).
- Special events (e.g. birthday party).
- What happened on the weekend.
You can help your child create a “My Stories” book, where you compile all the stories that are meaningful to them in a scrapbook. This is a great way to seal those memories for them and allows them to easily share their stories with others.