Come tell your story at our Storybook SCCLD early literacy-inspired play spaces! Make up a story around the campfire at Saratoga’s Redwood Romp or tell a tantalizing train-themed tale about WhistleBot at Milpitas’ Railway Rollick. Opportunities for storytelling are endless surrounded by rich collections of engaging children’s literature, playful characters, and spaces thoughtfully designed to inspire dramatic play.
Children need to build essential skills early on to become successful readers. The library provides opportunities that support the five simple practices to get every child ready to read: Talking, Singing, Reading, Writing, and Playing.
Why storytelling?
Storytelling helps develop crucial early literacy skills, such as background knowledge, print motivation, oral language, and narrative skills. Storytelling and playacting are powerful learning tools for children that deliver many benefits, including opportunities to:
Be creative and express themselves
Children share their identity and inner life, including their thoughts, ideas, and experiences, through storytelling and imaginative play.
Cooperate and solve problems
Telling stories through dramatic play allows children the opportunity to process social, emotional and cognitive challenges.
Develop social skills
Entertaining, communicating and creating with others, and navigating conflicts that might arise while collaborating creatively, all aid in the development of crucial social skills.
Learn about emotions
Dramatic play and storytelling help process and communicate emotions and better understand the feelings of others. Stories and characters help children develop empathy, allowing them to explore other perspectives.
Build vocabulary and reading comprehension
Children who hear or create a story, then participate in pretend play related to it, remember more from the story, increase grammatical complexity, and can retell the story with more descriptive details.
Learn how to construct a narrative
Children’s narrative skills are considered necessary for their literacy achievement. By Kindergarten, they should be able to retell stories, including important details, characters, settings, and major events. When children tell stories they practice and develop their narrative skills.
Everyone has a tale to tell, and our children's spaces are full of material for inspiring compelling stories. Grab a book from the shelves and allow it to enrich your child’s play and learning. Encourage them to jump on the Ainsley Stage at the Campbell Library Play Space (COMING SOON!), burrow through Gilroy’s Earthen Excursion, or explore the Trusty Trails in Morgan Hill Library, and joyfully express their creativity. They can act out or retell a story they’ve heard, improvise their own fantastical tale, or share and reflect on something they have experienced or learned about. Most importantly - don’t forget to join them in their fun!
Inspire storytelling anywhere with these fun activities:
- Encourage your child to express a story you’ve read together, or their original tale, through art.
- Create a book together by writing down the story they dictate. Children can create the illustrations; scribbling is a pre-writing skill and helps develop the fine motor skills that they will need to learn to write.
- Play a storytelling game, taking turns adding what happens next in the story. As you tell the story together, ask open-ended questions, like: “Who is your story about?” “Where are they?” “What happens to them?” “How did they feel about it?”
- Explore a wordless picture book together. Children can help tell the story by describing what they see in the illustrations. This storytelling-inspired booklist includes some wonderful wordless picture books:
