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.   

clker.com_reading-story-book-to-kids-md

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…