Storytelling

At Wood Farm School we use storytelling as a way of helping us become great writers. Stories are magical and not only are they fun to learn, but they give us great vocabulary and ideas for our own writing.

Throughout the school we learn traditional stories such as myths, fables and fairy tales, as well as modern stories and stories based on published texts. As part of our storytelling approach in school we listen to stories being told orally. Sometimes we invent actions for the story and then we create a map of pictures to helps us remember it. After that, we work out a sequence of freeze frame gestures, words and sounds that summarise the main sequence of events in the story. By this time, we are ready to begin telling the story aloud. Sometimes we tell a story word for word and other times we tell our own version of the story using some of the key vocabulary; it might sound slightly different every time we tell it!

Once we have learnt a story, we have fun exploring it – we do lots of drama activities to help us understand what is happening and how the characters in the story might be feeling.

Stories are important: they help us to make sense of the world

Finally, we do lots of writing. We might write a more detailed version of the story or even create our own version of the story by changing the characters, setting or ending. The more stories we listen to and learn, the more ideas we have to create fantastic stories of our own which we write independently.

Storytelling is not only fun, it’s helping all the pupils in our school become great writers.

For teachers and schools: click here to find out more about training and professional development opportunities in the storytelling approach.