Teaching with stories!

Hello everyone! Today I want to speak about teaching contents trough stories.

What do you think? Is it possible? Well, after the last seminar, I was thinking about that stories are something that most children use to enjoy and have fun with them, so I thought that may be it will be a good resource for us as futures teachers to use and make easier to explain some contents, or just to don’t make classes so boring.

We can use the stories as we want, for example we can change or modify one part to explain what we want, but it is not always necessary because we also can use the original story. Let’s use a simple one as Little Red Riding Hood and have a look to the first part of the story:

“Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl, the prettiest creature who was ever seen. Her mother was excessively fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more. This good woman had a little red riding hood made for her. It suited the girl so extremely well that everybody called her Little Red Riding Hood.

One day her mother, having made some cakes, said to her, “Go, my dear, and see how your grandmother is doing, for I hear she has been very ill. Take her a cake, and this little pot of butter.”

Little Red Riding Hood set out immediately to go to her grandmother, who lived in another village.

As she was going through the wood, she met with a wolf, who had a very great mind to eat her up”

If we pay attention, we can see that we could teach some contents using the story, for example, little red riding hood lived in a village, so we can start teaching the different locations or the types of forest that there are and the reasons of why she lived there.  Secondly we can see that she only lived with her mother, so it could be a good idea to use this situation in order  to explain the variety of families that there could be. Also we can talk about the wolf and the mammals, their diet and their way of living.

These are only some examples, but of course there are plenty of them, so, if you think that it is useful…let’s start using stories!

2 thoughts on “Teaching with stories!

  1. Hi Nerea.
    I agree with you about stories can be a good tool to teach because are a very good cross-curricular materials. You can use, as you said, where the main character of our story lived to teach the rural and urban areas, for example.
    I think also that stories are a way to introduce the popular literature to children, for example with Little Red Riding Hood. We can work with them in a different way and try to focused on the idea of books as a container of many topics and not only as books as storytellers.

  2. Hello Nerea, I like a lot your post, because you show us really interesting ideas in relation with stories. They are very useful in order to apply them in our future lessons. More in detail, it is fantastic that you deduced those learning contents from the story Little Red Riding Hood. I suppose that in the same way, it is possible to analyze other really famous stories such as Sleepy Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella…
    All of these ideas reminds me of the subject Natural Science Didactics (do you remember it? we studied this subject last year), where we had to prepare an activity that was quite similar to your propose. The teacher let us choose between some famous stories, then, we had to adapt them (that is, we could change a little bit the original story, as many famous writers did along history with tales) to teach concrete science contents. For instance, my partner and me chose Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Through that story, we tried to teach concepts related to measure such as temperature (remember that Goldilocks tasted three different soup bowls) and length (Goldilocks took place in three different chairs).
    It was a creative and interesting activity and these resources can be really motivating for children.

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