Making a Story

Background

Children’s engagement with stories begins very early and they love the world of fantasy. By giving expression to their fantasies, children can become very creative speakers and writers.

Aim

To develop speaking skills.

Activities

Collect odd things like lids, torn pieces of cloth, broken bangles, empty toothpaste tubes, little stones, leaves, nibs, etc. Make piles of five or six of these items, and distribute the piles among groups of five or six children. Each group finds a suitable place to sit down and talk about the things in the pile. The aim is to prepare a story in fifteen or twenty minutes. When all groups return to the classroom, one narrator in each group tells the story. Allow variations if other group members insist that the story has not been told correctly.

Related Questions

Success of this activity depends on how much experience your children have of listening to stories. Also, are they used to making up stories? Just about any common experience can be narrated as a nice, little story. Similarly, any common object can become the starting point of a narration. If you show this kind of imagination as a teacher, your children will soon acquire it.

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Adapted from: "The Child's language and the teacher - A handbook", Krishna Kumar, UNICEF.