Howard's ISCI 600 Blog

  As a teacher and parent, I knew going into this week’s storytelling experience that reading aloud to young children has massive amounts of benefits. However, I couldn’t name them all off the top of my head other than to say, “Of course reading to children is important!” The readings from this week helped me understand the data behind the importance of reading to children of all ages, but especially young children starting at birth. A 2015 study by Montag, Jones, and Smith revealed explicit data that showed reading books to infants and young children helped with learning new words more than just simple conversation did. They detailed, “The present results directly link early book reading to language acquisition and suggest a possible mechanism for which book reading benefits language acquisition” (p. 1495). While simply reading aloud to a child does introduce them to new words, they have to be fully engaged and excited about a book to take in the full benefits. When choosing my ...

For me, storytelling in terms of the library or school setting always meant an adult reading aloud a book to children. Sometimes that adult was very engaging and had different voices for characters or even an occasional prop, but it was never a production. After reading the first few chapters in Storytelling: art and technique by Ellin Greene and Janice Del Negro, I was reminded that storytelling got its start through the oral tradition of passing down stories. These original storytelling experiences did not involve printed books with pictures, but instead verbally beautifully crafted plots and settings. Furthermore, the article “Why Storytelling Matters” by Denise E. Agosto reminds every person who tells stories to children that the experience is just as important as the literature itself. She writes, “Critical thinking is closely tied to cognitive engagement: both involve deep thinking about story content and meaning” which occurs when a listener is actively engaged in the storyte...