Benefits of Using Stories as a Teaching Tool for Children
Using stories as a teaching tool initiates your child into a world of fantasy and intellectual knowledge. Let’s look at some of the enormous advantages of this fun activity.
Kids are usually more drawn to technology and games, rather than a good book. As adults responsible for raising children, we have the opportunity to teach them about reading as an alternative form of entertainment.
The characters in a story and the situations they encounter can be connected to your child’s experiences in real life, and may even show them solutions.
In other words, a story shows events from daily life in a magical context. This helps your child understand the emotions and challenges they experience.
The Benefits of Using Stories as a Teaching tool
Stories are a great teaching tool to support your child’s development as a person. This is because stories allow the child to interact with their own feelings via the various situations they read about.
Similarly, reading also develops your child’s reasoning skills as they search for solutions for various situations. Stories open the door to a world of fantasy that is full of fun and improves their retentive capacity.
The main benefit of using stories as a teaching tool is increasing your child’s interest in reading and turning it into a habit.
Other Benefits
- There’s nothing harmful about it. In fact, it creates feelings of safety and calm.
- Books are seductive. If a book draws in a little reader, it creates a strong connection to this beneficial habit.
- Reading stimulates memory, intelligence, and concentration.
- Books lay the groundwork for the skill of analysis.
- Reading can help resolve behavior problems.
With all these advantages, you have in your hands an incredible tool for reinforcing values, problem-solving, and managing emotions. Reading can help change your child’s perspective on a fact or person in a positive way.
It also develops their imagination through the magic and creativity involved. Your child gets to explore new sensations and emotions. Stories as a teaching tool provide new learning environments in which the child feels comfortable and open to participation.
The key for success using this strategy is teaching in a relaxed, simple way. By doing this, you strengthen your child’s socialization, values, positive attitudes, and increase their social and cultural development.
“A story shows events from daily life in a magical context. This helps your child understand the emotions and challenges they experience.”
The Importance of Stories as a Teaching Tool
Stories help with your child’s affective, cognitive, and social development. Through various stories, children develop their thinking and create expectations about what will happen.
As they read along, different emotions come to the surface. Your child feels the victories of the characters as if they were their own due to the connection they’ve formed.
On the other hand, there are also some other major benefits of stories:
Higher Self-Esteem
Children identify with the different situations they experience through a story and its characters. Often they see similarities to their lives and then use that as a way to resolve problems like the characters in a story they’ve read.
A story shows events from daily life in a magical context. This helps your child understand the emotions and challenges they experience.
Confronting monsters, defeating fears, and avoiding battles are all situations that create higher self-esteem for children.
Teaching Values
Stories are an effective tool for changing behavior by teaching universal values. Most stories have a main lesson or moral that can be applied in everyday life.
This process helps children recognize what they should and shouldn’t do. At the same time, they work on their ability to reason and reflect on their actions.
In short, stories as a teaching tool are valuable not just because they nurture our children‘s vocabularies, but also because they open a world of social and educational possibilities. Don’t miss out on these benefits for your child!
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Burk, N. M. (2000). Empowering at-risk students: storytelling as a pedagogical tool. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED447497
- BARTON, R., & BARTON, G. (2017). The importance of storytelling as a pedagogical tool for indigenous children. In Narratives in Early Childhood Education (pp. 61-74). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781317277330/chapters/10.4324%2F9781315640549-11
- Coulter, C., Michael, C., & Poynor, L. (2007). Storytelling as pedagogy: An unexpected outcome of narrative inquiry. Curriculum Inquiry, 37(2), 103-122. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-873X.2007.00375.x
- Reyes Torres, A., Pich Ponce, E., & García Pastor, M. D. (2012). Digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool within a didactic sequence in foreign language teaching. Digital Education Review, 22. https://idus.us.es/handle/11441/52722;jsessionid=6DFB09AE7023095E93F3AAD191400E2A?