“We are storytellers. We all live in a network of stories.

There isn’t a stronger connection between

people than storytelling.”
Jimmy Neil Smith

Children grow up unfolding the world around them by reading and listening to various
stories. Parents, teachers and caregivers are to provide little minds with worthy things to read and to
learn, as in this vulnerable age they still can’t always choose what to read. With the help of books
children dive deeper into literacy: they derive new meanings, learn new notions, practice
pronunciation, develop their critical and logical thinking. Reading is such an activity that brings
numerous benefits to a reader: starting from growing one’s vocabulary, ending with making up
one’s mind about the world on the whole. As a parent, I realize that storytelling with my children
will not only develop their listening and comprehension skills, but also will strengthen a bond
between us. Setting storytelling as a daily routine may become a sort of a family ritual, or a
classroom ritual for a teacher that will have plenty of benefits in the long run for the children, such
as increasing their attention and developing their outlook.
I chose a book “In My Heart” by Jo Witek as it perfectly suits the intended age group and
contains lots of vivid imagery about people’s feelings and emotions. Anderson and Guthrie (1999)
stated in their research that both reading and listening may enhance the ability of a child to
understand the world around them. The notions presented in the text are exposed in the specific
context which assists in developing this understanding.
As I’m a mother of three, this experience of reading out loud was not a new activity for me.
I enjoy reading to my children as it helps us to have precious moments of intimacy at the end of the
day. Nevertheless doing this activity “on camera” was quite nerve wrecking. I did my best to
express emotions using my voice, so as to bring more clarity to what is being said. There is a lot of
information that can be transmitted through the pages of this book, consequently I used the pitch of
my voice and the tempo in the way that it is easy to comprehend and catch the smallest detail. As
the speaker of the book is a little girl, I didn’t have to change my voice much, but certainly, I used
intonation patterns to highlight the main points in my speech.
Because this book explains the emotions, I think it’s essential to stop and explain or
illustrate/demonstrate each particular emotion, although author did a fantastic job on giving
meaning through the text. Due to the fact that teachers tend to focus greatly on literacy and
vocabulary development when reading an insightful text (Pellegrini, Perlmutter, Galda, and Brody,
1990), such activity assists children in improving their vocabulary and learning new words,
therefore it leads to developin word awareness among young learners.
Because comprehensive text in informative books may be so useful for a daily use in
accordance with the research by Duke (2000), I made a decision to incorporate it in my classroom.
It has not been long ago since teachers realized the value of using information text in the early
childhood classroom. Still the results are obvious and were proved by a study by Nell K. Duke,
therefore more and more educators follow this pattern, help students to get acquainted with
informative texts, provide instructional exercises, teach comprehension ways and strategies and
develop the ability to content read.
Overall, as storytelling is simple, easy to accomplish task for both parents and teachers, and
may teach young children about various aspects of life, it should be made a daily family and school
routine. Moreover, besides purely educational benefits, we can disregard the fact that storytelling
improves the bond between parents and children, as well as teachers and their students and creates a
sense of safety.