The role of stories in learning

Children listening to stories in rapt attention is a common sight we come across. As the story unfolds, it triggers a variety of emotions and transforms the child’s mind into an imaginary world.

Listening to stories helps in the development of listening skill and observation, and nurtures basic skills like attention, visual and auditory ability, thinking and motor development. It also paves the way for speech and language development. These skills assist the child to graduate to a reading level.

Apart from these, the child learns to socialise and interact with others by way of using words and later sentences.

As the child grows to kindergarten level, reading of words and sentences begins. Stories could be a useful tool for the family and the teachers alike. It can arrest the attention of the child by making reading more interesting and attractive. Reading involves decoding of words and comprehension.

Stories could enthuse the child to pick up easily the phoneme-grapheme (sound-letter) relationship to decode words and gather the meaning of the story. It creates an expectation and suspense to know what comes ahead. A number of exercises like narration of story, completing an incomplete story, creating his or her own stories and making up a story on a given situation would have a very beneficial result.

No doubt it helps the language development but additionally, it gives an opportunity to gather information, to assimilate facts, imagine, express emotion and think creatively.

Writing is an essential and an inevitable part of learning. As the child moves up the ladder of grades, writing gets more complicated and refined. It is also true that writing is a complex competency. It involves many skills like vocabulary development, sentence structuring and organising ability.

Logical thinking

By the time the child reaches 7-8 years of age, logical thinking sets in. Interesting stories could definitely help in understanding the cause-effect concept, to develop problem-solving skills and to comprehend the consequences of their actions.

By teenage years, abstract thinking and interpersonal behaviour take a leap in growth. At this stage, children are able to acquire executive functional skills like planning, organising and carrying out tasks.

Panchatantra stories were said to have played a role in transforming naive princes into wise men. It is very interesting to recall the clever mode of teaching adopted by great mathematician and astronomer ‘Bhaskara II’.

In his mathematics text, Lilavati, many problems were posed with animal characters like cranes, monkeys to create puzzle-stories to be solved. These had different algebraic and geometric solutions. There are many websites which could be used by parents and teachers. Introduction of tales of great personalities would be inspirational as well.