A toddler learns to do many things from surroundings, as well as from their mother importantly. As the child becomes a teenager and enters adulthood, school education becomes part and parcel along with parental education at home.
According to research conducted in 2015, up to 61% of working-age adults in England find it difficult to understand health and well-being information. This is often referred to as “health literacy’ and it can affect people’s ability to manage long term conditions and make informed choices about their health and well-being’. So, recreation in life is important with stories being one way of learning to read and listen to shape the view of the world as a child.
Stories are the oldest form of teaching. These create magic and a sense of wonder teaching about life, about us and about others. Albert Einstein once said: ‘If you want your children to be smart, tell them stories. If you want them to be brilliant, tell them more stories.’ This way a child would develop respect, understanding for diverse cultures promoting positive attitudes towards different regions and religions.
Stories are the key channel to communicate through picture books, dances, images, mathematical equations, songs or oral re-tellings. These relate to how children articulate the characters linked in the story in their lives and thus develop perspectives about the world and things around. Studies show that stories create enthusiasm to the written words to know the role of male and female characters as well as other creatures that help the children to enact the roles mirroring the present-day boy or man and girl or women which changes the perspective of mediocrity to intelligence.
A moment of magic is created wherein a child is enthralled in awe, mouth wide opened and sparkling wide eyes with stories of games, fictional characters such as cartoons of kings, fascinating creatures more of which improves the listening skills, knowledge and enhancing the academic vocabulary along with the overall creative and dynamic developments in thoughts and actions. To listen and to read via gadgets impact the minds. Our brains become dumping grounds where imaginations somehow cease, thus making digital storytelling a kind of what is spoon-fed. Listening and seeing the narrations of expressions creates a visualisation of imaginations.
Good old days of stories narrated by grandparents when children, kids, toddlers, or even to some extent teenagers and adults would lie besides grannies helping the children to become what we are now. The pandemic times has brought several learnings and forced everybody to look around and ponder. The wonderful illustrations are the most exciting parts for engrossing the readers (children) depicting their excitement to the marvels of the story-end.
The stories can make the children be friends with the books or characters they know boosting the confidence of language learning, relaxation, imagination and the GAME-ON spirits of coping up with the feelings. And in now invading times of technology, the art of storytelling is rare. This is another feather in the hat of how children and grandparents are developing happy bonds and renewing a happy space of storytelling. The child engages, play, enquire, plan in many ways. So, stories are lessons of life enabling to know one-self more at each phase of life.
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Image credit: Freepik
