Reading & Telling Story Tips For Kids: Benefits and Becoming an Amazing Reader

Reading Story Benefits

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I do believe reading could give so many advantages for our kids. The advantages may be the extending our child thinking mind and also their skills of communication. As you can see by reading a story our child would enhance certain aspects on his brain. 

Expanding kid Imagination and visualization on his brain. I think it is not easy to visualize what we heard and read into our mind. by reading a story, without we realize our brain or our kids brain will develop gradually. They try to make something that they read and listen become real.

Increasing humanism values. I guess by understanding the character through the character’s emotion and feelings may help our kid to sharpen their sympathy and empathy so that they become self aware and caring toward their environment. 

Sharpening their analytical and problem solving skill. Most of story must have problem inside no matter it is complicated or just simple problem. Here, if we can ask our kids to analyze the main problem carefully and guide them to reach the best solution, it may help them to cope daily life problem surround them.

Enlarging their vocabulary bank. Yups… how could we find more uncommonly terms rather than reading a text written by someone else. By reading, automatically our kids will develop their vocabulary bank. 

Expanding their general knowledge. A story usually gives a different setting time and place and also certain background of the character. By digging up those elements of a story they will expand their general knowledge. For example: where does the story come from?  how’s the way of living its inhabitant? etc.

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Improving their language skills. it happens when we ask our kids to reach aloud one by one, without we realize, it will improve the pronunciation skills for the one who reads the story and it also improve their listening skills. I really suggest this for ESL school system. 

Based on that values mentioned above, reading story would be very exciting and useful activity in our class. After, I wrote what I have done to prepare reading activity in the class, I think I would share how I read the story in the class. For addition information, my class ranges are from grade three to six. Our school considered English as English for Foreign Language. But I believe, they are on progress to English as Secondary Language. here are the tips.

Read by paragraph and get our kid to get in the story.  I think everyone would agree a teacher should become a role model when reading a story. By reading through paragraph and of course, pay attention a lot to the periods, comma and stressed words in the passage, will help our kids to understand easily. Please avoid reading sentence by sentence and explain those to them. I would give a chance to my kids to read the story after we finish reading entire text.  

Use a simple translation when you find some new or “fresh” vocabularies. Make sure your kids enjoy the reading first then you may ask them the synonym or antonym of those words in the end of the activity.  

Raise a question or two related to the passage they have read. Make sure you raise some unique, humorous, unexpected and fun questions so that they will laugh and keep wondering when trying to give answers.   

Don’t ask them to open up off and on their dictionary every time they found new terms. You should be ready with some simple synonyms or antonyms of the terms you have thought before.

You don’t have to read exactly as what is on the text or the papers, books. Feel free when reading a story you may add up some spicy by using their names, additional attitude and more. Make sure it is just an intermezzo. I use this to make sure some students keep in focus. 

Give mark or highlights on certain characters, setting of time, the place, and some important events or incidents in the story. You may use some color of highlighter. Well, they will be much assisted when they have to answer following question. Besides, their paper would be more colorful. It is more interesting and fun than looking at a plain white paper which has hype of words.   

Becoming an Amazing Reader  means totality or give ONE HUNDRED PERCENT: Attitude and Voice when reading a story.

Interesting or not of a story depends on the reader. Remember, you are the main actor or the CENTRE of CLASS GRAVITY. That’s why when you don’t perform well, the story will be nothing different than a plain text book. And of course, it is far away from fun!!!

Stand up when you read story in your class. You may walk around the class. Besides, when you are standing up, you could use your gesture and body language freely. for addition, you may act and speak to your students when you are reading certain dialogue as if you talk to them. 

Be Animated – Mimic, Gesture and Volume of Voice. Use them all as if you are the actor on the screen. Believe me your kids will get entertained. I suggest you to avoid a silly acting. It will make you lose your credibility among the kids. Use your mimic to express what the character’s feeling as if they were sad, crying, surprised etc. Talking about voice, you should able to use the stresses and flow. 

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When you are reading a passage that involves the dark night, full of silent and bit of spooky, I guess you should read in low tone and you may read word by word so that your kid will feel the atmosphere as you expect them to feel. Suddenly, you can jump out and speak in high volume of voice for giving up a “surprised” for your kids. I did this. And they like it a lot! Another case, when you imitate the voice of old grandma, you should speak rather deep and rough.  You may also use several kind of voice to support your reading.

Hang the plot when you make your story in couple episodes. You they will feel curious and always wanting the next part. 

That’s what I have done to my kids and for English lesson weekly activity. They love it so and can’t wait for reading more stories.

Happy Trying…  

Reading & Telling Story Tips For Kids

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Preparation before reading a story

Do you still remember some of comedy movies such as “Mrs Doubfire”? Or perhaps the newer one like

The Inkheart? or another movie entitled as “The Bed Time Story”? As we all know the silver lining between those movies is the ability to tell or read a story deeply and fully animated so that the story could come to real. Well, telling story or reading a story is a really amazing activity especially for kids. No wonder, those scripts have been shown on screen.

  

Actually you may find hype of book and tons of articles about this kind, anyhow what I will write here purely based on my experience when having similar activity with my kids in my English class. Well, I made an agreement with the class that I taught to tell them story one a week. As information, I have 5 lesson hours in a week for every class. So I allocated one of five hours for reading story activity. I have very glad that all my kid accepted and followed the lesson enthusiastic. Look! They were still in grade three to six. Furthermore, they kept demanding a new story after we had finished one story.  And I hope I could share my experience with you. I am not telling that I am good story teller or reader. This is what I have done and I am happy to share to you.

Choose The Right Story

There are millions stories you can easily get from various sources. You may download them from the internet; you may get from daily newspaper, special edition magazine or books. Well, I could suggest storynory.com if you want to browse some story. What I want to tell is you should have a picture in your mind about the kids you teach and also about their interest. 

Here are what can I suggest you to do.

• Select the story to the range of their imagination and their age of course. You should match the theme of the story to their world.  I think kids prefer the adventurous, bit of humor, bit of thrilling, and not to forget the story MUST have “a little surprise” element on its plots. I bet they would like to get something different that the ordinary storyline.
• You may also choose story with similar background like your kid background. For instance the background could be schooling background, camping mates, etc.  
• You may also try a story which is totally new or fresh to their imagination. For Example, A which at the school, a racing adventure, or try epics story which involves ancient Olympians Gods and Goddesses.  
• Choose story with suitable vocabulary to their caliber so they will fell more enjoy when reading and they will not have burden to open up on and on their thesaurus.

Read Throughout The Story

“How could do something excellently to its perfection unless you love it so”

From the line above I just could suggest you not only to read and understand the whole story but also to love the story you will read or tell to your kids. I believe when you love the story, you will find millions of interesting parts in or out of the story to be added up as “the spicy” of your activity. It is very important to raise and maintain their curiosity through the reading activity.  You may also raise some “fresh” questions correlated with your story. Then, I could guarantee you kids will be focus from the time you read the title till the time you read the last word of your story.   

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The Great Race..

I took for example an adventure story called “The Great Race” by R.R. Kane. The story tells about the effort of a common people to be the first person who reaches the finish line from a intercontinental race. It is said that he had a great rivalry from another racer which are from more modern countries. The competitors had fully supported gadgets and more sponsors in order to win the race. The story also tells that every country they will pass, would gave various difficulties. And it has what I have mentioned above the humor, the surprised, some unexpected things to happen. I really recommend you this story.

By the way if you want to have a copy of the story I could send you by email.

Most kids don’t like reading for long hours, they prefer to ask, to use their mind, to process what they read and listen. Breaking up a short story into some episodes would be a good solution in order to avoid them from being bored. Basically we can read the story for about ten to an hour length but I prefer to have ten to fifteen minutes reading the story and the rest hour for the activity will be discussing over, make a prediction, dig up their mind and way of thinking by giving some rhetorical questions. I usually break a short story into four to five episodes.    

Presenting a simple rule and consequent is also recommended. You don’t want they get over excited and bit of uncontrolled do you?

Come up with some of question for the preview before reading a story. The question could be about the asking about some fun facts in the story and some tricky question just to raise their curiosity.

Make sure you can control the class when they give some answer. I usually give closed questions. Answer by raising hand would be a good way to keep the class bit in control too. you may also raise an open question just to make them bit respected and feel in touch in the story.  

Ask them to prepare some stuff necessary like couple of highlighters, pen or pencils to take a note about the story.

Make a good preparation as what you need to support your activity. Globe, map, couple of animal stuff and figurines may make your activity more fun.

Be Well prepared before you started your show in the class…

Making and Building a Cardbox Castle

An Elementary Students’ Project & Interesting Activity

 

Can you imagine living in a castle before? Or perhaps having a castle on your own?... 

Do you ever realize a castle hold a deep secret and mystery?

Could you imagine how they build such a tremendous concrete with a minimum building tool?

So does the feeling that most of my students had... They really want to feel living in a medieval era.

It was on October 2011, when my school held an exhibition. The exhibition itself mainly would display our students’ creativity works and performed some talent they got. The theme itself called “Around The world”. So every department in my former school established certain culture themes that represented five big continents in the world. The Playgroup or kindergarten displayed Hawaiian theme, The lower grade of elementary displayed Japanese Culture, The higher grade displayed Oriental Customs, The Senior School had a Halloween Around the world and the National Plus department displayed European Culture.

So why did we build a castle?

As we had learned and made some researches through books and internets, we conclude that European countries have some marvelous castle from the medieval ages. Today the castle itself still stands tall and has a function as Gallery, museum and sort of learning centre. Besides, The process of building is an interesting activities for our kids. 

The Planning of Making the Cardbox Castle;

In order to accomplish this idea to become real we need a well-planned design of course. The planning scoped about the materials we need, the builders, the fund we have, the master design of the castle, the ornament we need, the media we need to display and of course the time management doing this become real. We have only two weeks time and as you can see, we cannot leave our daily lesson behind. 

 So this is what we have done

By the time, the teachers and kids agreed that we would build the castle, we set some job description.

Every student must bring one or two or even more boxes. We standardized the box we collect which was from after used drinking bottle package. Well, it would be like a big brick. We set a week time for collecting all of the cardbox. 

While we collected the boxes, we are using 70 minutes a day of our lesson to make decorations and attributes for our castle. There were around 60-70 builders, most of them were our students ranged of age between 6-12 years old. They are divided into some groups which have different task and responsibilities:

Grade 1: FLY the FLAG

They made a triangular flag of some countries in Europe. For the material, they used a white concrete paper. They cut the paper into triangular shape. Drew a flag on the paper and colored it when finished drawing a flag. One student should have made one flag.

Grade 2: WELCOMING Greetings

It is quite difficult. Everyone must make a welcoming greeting such as “WELCOME” in various languages spoken in Europe. They must choose what language they want to use. They have to search the translation of every meaning in various languages. After that they will write them down on piece of papers with colorful tone and fonts.  They shouldn’t print from any computer. It even looks artistic. Every student should have produced one or two greetings.  

Grade 3: The EUROPEAN Tribes and Race

 

Yeaaah  this is the task for grade 3 students. They should find Black and White pictures of some tribes and races live in Europe. They should put some color on the pictures and write something about the tribes and races. this time they focused writing about the traditional costumes.  They preferred the Dutch Little girl costumes, the Viking, The Roman Soldier, the great philosophers from Greece, and some more. 

Grade 4: They have joined higher Grades

Grade 5: Landmark and Highlights

Meanwhile grade 5 students would make some handwriting article about European Landmarks. They wrote something they like. For instance, they write about Eiffel tower, Leaning Tower Pisa, The coliseum in Rome! Why? Because some of them have a dream to visit some countries in Europe and they really wants to write about it. Thing that I like about their writing is THE FUN FACTS they wrote after they made several researches thorough literary and internet.       

 Grade 6: FUN FACTS about EUROPEAN Countries

Grade 6 students have a part to make a short report about some European countries. Their writing focused on the general information, special icons and also Fun facts they found in some countries in Europe. 

One simple rule is No Copy Paste from related sources. if they are proven doing this cheating, their works will not share a spot on the castle and more over they will get severe penalty. We should have finished this attributes for about a week. We really had to plan this well.

The Step of Making the cardbox castle.

After the entire classes gather all the cardbox we had demanded and instructed, we started to work on our castle step by step.  

First, flip down the paper.

Some Grade 5 & 6 students did this part in turn. There were 5-6 students each turn. We flipped down the box so that the brand of drinking bottle producer hidden. It means that we use the inner side of the box to the outer part of our bricks from boxes. Beside it will save more paints in our project. We had to be efficient. 

Second, stick and tape the box. 

Now, we should make a lot of bricks again from the flipped down. here the job is quite easy. we need tape and big stapler to make our bricks more solid. it is also to main its shape so it will be easy to construct a wall made from boxes.

Third, Build a temporary Castle

After all the box are flipped down and taped, we make a castle simulation building. We set the wide and the length of the castle. We also set up the height of the castle. This is the prototype. Other word, we can figure out how many more boxes we need. 

After that, solidify the castle

After we are pretty sure all the materials ready, we set up the cornerstone on the spot we have decided and begin the construction work.  Soon after we are sure, the model of our castle, we make it more solid by taping the edge of every brick. We need a lot of taping measure in this part. Make sure the tape is made of paper or any materials which enable us to cover the tape with paint.

Next, Paint the castle.

After all of boxes are used and the building has erected, we should paint the wall of the castle. there are two option anyway: let it as original color which is brown or paint the boxes darker. you can cover up with grey or yellow. but make sure you differentiate the color between the color every edge of the brick and the brick/wall itself. 

Then, Make additional iconic landmarks. 

We add up with European traditional iconic which is made from the left over boxes and Styrofoam. The models are far away alike from the genuine icon but that’s the unique point. These time we made the London’s Big Ben, the Dutch’ Windmill, and the Paris’ Eiffel Tower. Tthis is not mandatory step, in case if you still have time left you probably could do this.

Finally, Display the attributed

After the paint is dry; the castle model is ready; and for the final steps, we display the children’ projects. We glue them on the wall, hang them on the rope, and just placed them on the wall upper surface. Set up traditional Irish and Scottish music.  We also ask people a very small of money in case they want to take picture in front of our castle.  

I think your children will have challenge and fun activity when you start firing this idea to your class.

Happy Trying