We celebrated World Storytelling Day on 20th March, this day was originally introduced to highlight the importance of children reading every day! This was celebrated in many different ways at KinderPark with some centres reading their children’s favourite stories or re-enacting scenes from books – ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ is always a popular choice for this experience! Some of our centres had families share cultural stories with their children and their peers.
Reading to your child every day provides so many benefits, some of the most relevant are:
- Helping your child get to know sounds, word and language, and develop early literacy skills
- Learning to value books and stories
- Sparking your child’s imagination ad stimulate curiosity
- Helping develop your child’s brain, ability to focus, concentration, social skills and communication skills
- Helping your child learn the difference between ‘real’ and ‘make-believe’
- Helping your child understand new or frightening events, and the strong emotions that come with them
- Helping your child learn about the world, their own culture and other cultures
In addition to the benefits above, reading a story with your child is a time to cuddle, feel connection and share interests. These are times that children cherish and create positive interactions with their most valued people!
At KinderPark we encourage literacy in all different ways, reading stories one on one and in groups is just one way that literacy is introduced to the children in our centres. By talking to children about stories or making stories with them we begin building the foundation of a lifelong love of reading and stories. This feeds into singing songs, rhymes and describing routines that we are following and what we are doing. An example might be reading the menu for the day, this creates an understanding that by reading we can gather and share information.
As children grow and move into older rooms we begin to focus on their recognition of letters and use ways to engage their curiosity in the written word without set expectations of outcomes. By teaching literacy through play children integrate themselves into play and begin to show understanding, some experiences you may see us include are pads of paper in a shopping experience where children may write a ‘list’ of what they are buying, construction areas with blank paper so that children can write their plans for the buildings they will create or locker tags with their name clearly labelled so that they can begin to recognise their own names. All these examples are ways that we embed and encourage literacy while enabling your children to explore and discover at their own pace.
We can definitely see that literacy and story telling is an important part of early childhood so share a story with your children today! If you are looking for a recommendation just speak to one of our Co-workers the next time you are in one of our KinderPark centres, we all have a favourite!
By Antonette Neri (KinderPark Co-worker)