Building Narrative Skills

Narrative skills are an essential component of the early literacy skills children need to have in order to be able to read and write. Narrative skills are all about storytelling – being able to describe things, tell events in order and retell stories. The ability to do these things helps children understand what they hear when you read to them and will help with reading comprehension later on.

Here are some ways you can help your child develop narrative skills:

· Ask questions that encourage conversations rather than yes/no or right/wrong answers. Instead of, "Do you have your shoes on?" ask "Where are your shoes?"

· Talk about your day and its series of events. Narrate your actions in simple terms. You could say "First we’ll eat breakfast, then we’ll brush our teeth, and then we’ll get dressed and go to the park."

· Retell familiar stories without the book.

· When reading a story, guess what comes next – or come up with a different ending.

· Read stories without words. This is great for developing narrative skills!

· Read a story and let your child retell it, act it out, or draw it and explain the drawing.

· Have your child talk about what he knows and retell real-life events ("What did you do this morning?").

· Use props to retell a story – you can use puppets, toys, and even cardboard boxes!

· Ask your child to tell you a story.

· Have your child tell you about pictures she draws.

· As your child gets older, label not just things but also actions, feelings, and ideas. Talk about your own feelings. Use words to say what your child might be feeling. 

Guest post by Allison C.

We've Got Skills...Narrative Skills!

In order for kids to be able to read, acquiring certain pre-reading skills is essential. Possessing strong narrative skills--the ability to describe things, put events in order, and retell stories--is important for reading success. Helping your child develop narrative skills is something that you can do early on, even when your little one is a baby. Here are some easy ways to help develop these skills at different ages:

Babies: When your baby is babbling and cooing, talk to him and add more words to it. It’s okay that you don’t know exactly what he’s saying!

Toddlers: As you go through your day, narrate for your child. Hearing you talk in detail about what you’re doing will help her understand how to order events. For example: “Let’s brush your teeth. First we’ll get your toothbrush. Then, we’ll need to find the toothpaste and unscrew the cap. After that, we’ll squeeze a little onto your brush. Now we’re ready to clean your teeth!”

Preschoolers: Encourage your child to retell stories after you read them. Not only does doing this help to strengthen his narrative skills, but it also gives an indication of his comprehension level. If he’s having trouble, you can prompt him: “How did the story start? Then what? What happened next? How did it end?”

By assisting your child in developing narrative skills, you’re not only helping her get ready to read, but you’re also making it easier for her to express herself.

GET OUT! No, Really, Get Out.

Spring might not officially start until next week, but for those of us here in Ohio, where the winter has been long and fierce, the 50-degree temperatures that we’re seeing this week make us want to run outside in shorts and t-shirts and jump for joy! I’m sure that a much-needed trip to the park is on the schedule of many families with little ones who’ve been cooped up for the last several months. This is the one time of the year that I won’t be offended if parents choose a trip to the park over a visit to the library. ;)

Seriously though, playing is actually one of the best ways for kids to learn language and literacy skills. This may sound too good to be true, but it’s just good AND true! For one, pretend play helps children think symbolically. The ability to imagine that a swing is a rocket ship or a little brother is a dinosaur allows kids to use their imagination when listening to stories and even helps them to tell their own stories. Plus, the ability to understand that one thing can stand for another helps children realize that written words can represent real objects. That’s an important idea for pre-readers to grasp.

After a trip to the park, encouraging children to talk about their experiences—what they did there, what their favorite parts were, what they might do next time—helps them develop narrative skills.

So, thaw out and do some playing, and then remember to come back to the library to visit us again soon!

Nursery Rhymes: Creating a Solid Foundation

These days, it seems that reciting nursery rhymes is a little less commonplace than it has been in the past. This is unfortunate, since learning nursery rhymes has many early-literacy benefits for young children.

First, nursery rhymes expand children’s vocabulary by exposing them to a variety of words that are not used in everyday conversation. What a great, easy way to build your child’s vocabulary!

Through nursery rhymes, children also hear rhyming words, which helps develop phonological awareness. Research shows that children who know rhymes find it easier to learn to read because they are better able to break down the sounds in words.

In addition, most nursery rhymes follow a clear sequence of events. This helps your child start to develop narrative skills and learn the way in which most stories are organized.

Finally, nursery rhymes are so easy to repeat that they can, often times, be some of a child’s first sentences. Even when children are struggling to string together words to form a sentence, they can repeat a nursery rhyme that they've heard often enough to memorize.

If you’re just starting to introduce nursery rhymes to your children, start with shorter ones, like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” Make sure to be animated to hold your children’s interest. When your children start to learn the rhymes, let them help by stopping to allow them to fill in a word or line. Best of all, since nursery rhymes are recited, you can say them anytime and anywhere—in the car, at the store, while cooking, or before bed. Use your imagination and have fun!

Check out these books for some great nursery rhymes:
My Mother Goose
Will Moses Mother Goose
The Cat and the Fiddle: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes
Mary Engelbreit’s Happy Mother Goose
Hickory, Dickory, Dock and Other Favorite Nursery Rhymes

Narrate Your Day!

In order to understand what they read, it’s critical for children to possess narrative skills, the ability to retell stories. Developing these narrative skills is something that can start at a very young age, even before children learn to talk! Besides reading to your child, here are a few ideas of ways you can help your little one develop strong narrative skills:

-Narrate your day—talk to your child about what you’re doing as you’re doing it. If your child is old enough to talk, encourage him to do the same.

-Talk to your baby when she babbles or coos and add some more words to it. It’s okay that you don’t know exactly what she’s saying!

-Give your child extra time to answer questions. Hearing a question and formulating a response involves at least three different parts of the brain. Plus, kids tend to be slower, since they haven’t had as much practice answering questions as we have!

-Use household items as props for your child to retell a story.

-Encourage your child to draw pictures and then tell you about what is in the picture.

-Tell your child stories about when you were a kid.

-Practice dialogic reading by prompting your child with questions and engaging him in discussions while reading.

-Have your child retell a favorite story or one you’ve recently read together.

-Talk about what is happening in the pictures when you’re reading with your child.

-Ask your child to predict what might come next in a story.

-Summarize stories after you’ve finished reading them.

Giving your child these powerful skills early on will dramatically impact her future reading success!

More Than Words

When we’re reading to a baby who is unfamiliar with most of the words and pictures in books, we tend to naturally stray from the text, pointing out the objects that we see on the pages. As kids get a little older and already know the names of everything in the illustrations, it’s easy for us to just stick to the words on the page. Adding your own commentary and discussion, however, can be really helpful in developing vocabulary and narrative skills, both of which are extremely important in getting your child ready to read.

When you’re reading, talk about the pictures and describe what’s going on. If you can, relate it to something familiar to your child. For example, if it’s a zoo book, talk about a time you and your child were at the zoo together. Give your child time to respond and add his commentary. Ask him to make predictions about what will happen next in the book.

To boost vocabulary, talk about any new words you may come across in the book and define each new word, rather than replace it with one that your child already knows. This is also a great opportunity to use new vocabulary words to describe objects or events in the book.

No matter what age your child is, spending a little extra time with a book--reading more than just the words on the page--can have a huge impact!

Got Words?

 

It may seem counterintuitive to help your child learn to read using wordless books (since reading does involve words and all…). These books, however, are actually great for developing some important pre-reading skills.

Since they show a clear order of events—first, next, then, finally—wordless books can help children develop narrative skills. Plus, even without words, children are able to see how books are read from left to right and front to back, as they follow the illustrations.

In her book, The ABCs of Literacy: Preparing Our Children for Lifelong Learning, Cynthia Collins acknowledges the important role that these books play, especially in language development: “…wordless books promote language development because children experiment with finding the precise word or phrase to accurately portray the image presented. When parents read aloud these types of texts and focus on using language inventively, our children learn from our example and take their own risks with retelling the tale.”

Wordless books also promote creativity. Even though a good portion of the plot is dictated by the illustrations, there’s always room to add more information or interpret the story in a different way. In fact, this can be a great way to keep from getting bored with a book—just change the story a little bit each time you read it!

So, if you haven’t read a wordless book with your child recently, you should try one out. Check out a few of my favorite new additions to our collection of wordless books:

Hank Finds an Egg by Rebecca Dudley
Flora and the Flamingo by Molly Idle
The Boy and the Airplane by Mark Pett

Play with a Purpose!

 

When promoting early literacy, the five practices are key—talking, reading, writing, singing, and playing. Playing is one thing that, as parents, you are constantly doing with your children. Thank goodness, too, because that interaction is incredibly important on so many levels. Even though play of any kind is beneficial, you can target certain areas of development by playing with a purpose in mind. Here are some ideas to reinforce different early literacy skills:

Phonological Awareness (hearing the smaller sounds in words): Play rhyming games with your child. Take turns thinking up words that rhyme with a chosen word. Or, play I Spy, giving clues like, “I spy something blue that rhymes with _______.”

Vocabulary: When your baby’s playing with a toy, use descriptive words to tell her what it is, how it looks, how it feels, etc. Hearing those new words will be a huge vocabulary-booster.

Print Awareness (knowing that print is everywhere and understanding that it has meaning): When you’re engaging in pretend play, make a menu for your restaurant or make labels for items in your pretend grocery store. This will help your child understand that the written words represent something else.

Letter Knowledge: Play with blocks of various color, shape, and size, and practice categorizing them. This will help your child when she starts trying to distinguish between different letters.

Narrative Skills: Act out stories together. You can even jazz it up by adding puppets or props. This is great storytelling practice for your little one.

Print Motivation (interest in/enjoyment of books and reading): Read a book using fun, silly voices. Your child will beg for more!

These activities are not only fun, but they’ll also help your little one prepare to read. So, don’t just play—play with a purpose!

Vacation Envy

 

I’m not going to lie—seeing all of these kids coming into the library during Spring Break has made me a little nostalgic for all of those vacations from school when I was young. And for those who haven’t come in, I’m jealous just imagining all of the exciting (and warm!) places they might be visiting right now…

Spring Break (or any vacation/special activity) provides a new opportunity for you to practice storytelling with your child. Whether or not you went on an exotic vacation, she’ll surely have something to share about a fun activity she did during break. Try having her write a story about it. You can do this together, too. If your little one is too young to write, have her tell you her story, and you can write it out for her. Encourage her to give lots of details in chronological order, including how she felt at different points throughout the story. Afterwards, she can illustrate it. In doing this, not only will she be building her narrative skills, but she’ll also be creating a hand-made keepsake from her adventure.

If you need a little inspiration, or you just want to read a fun vacation book, check out one of my favorites, Froggy Goes to Hawaii, by Jonathan London.

Good News Bad News

Using only three words, Jeff Mack manages to tell a cute and incredibly eventful story about two little furry friends. In Good News Bad News, the shortage of words is made up for by the abundance of hilarious illustrations. The two main characters, a rabbit and a mouse, have wildly different views about the things that happen to them. The pessimistic mouse thinks being rained on is “bad news.” At the same, the optimistic rabbit sees having an umbrella as “good news.” To the mouse, being blown away in the wind, while holding the umbrella, is “bad news.” And so the story continues, with the rabbit and mouse running into all sorts of obstacles and seeing everything differently.

This book is a great one to read with kids of all ages. With so few words in the book itself, it provides your child the opportunity to practice her narrative skills by doing some of the storytelling herself. You and your child will undoubtedly have fun discussions about what is happening in each hysterical illustration. In addition, with the repetition of “good news” and “bad news” on alternating pages throughout the story, your youngster will be able to read the words in the book herself. So, if you’re looking for a funny, touching, and all-around cute book to read with your little one, stop by the library and pick up Good News Bad News. The good news is that you won’t be disappointed!

Again?!

As parents of small children, I’m sure “again” and “more” are words that have haunted you in your sleep at some point. Children love repetition, and they aren’t shy about making that known! Though reading the same book over and over (and over, and over, and over…) becomes more than a little monotonous for adults, kids benefit from that repetition. Through repetition, their brain cells are making all kinds of connections which help them learn.

So, instead of discouraging your child from having you read the same book five times in a row, try reading it in different ways. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

-Rather than reading the words, go through the book looking only at the pictures. Talk about what each picture is, and relate what you can to experiences you or your child may have had.

-Try singing the story or using different voices to read it. It’s a silly way to switch it up enough to make the same story more interesting for you, and your child will LOVE it.

-Have your child retell the story to you. This will help him develop narrative skills which help with comprehension. Plus, it’s always fun to hear his understanding of the story’s events. If he has a hard time doing it without the book, have him go through and use the pictures to guide his retelling.

Hopefully these tips will help you survive those one-book marathons your child begs to have. And if you come up with any other creative ways to address this issue, by all means, please share them here!

And Then...

Ever notice how one thing can lead to another, and then another? Because Amelia Smiled by David Ezra Stein is a book that beautifully shows how when one young girl smiles, the impact is felt around the world. When Amelia smiled, someone thought of their grandson, and sent cookies to him in Mexico, and the cookies give him an idea which influenced someone else, and so on. Learning about the order of things is an important skill for young readers; it helps children with the concepts of beginning, middle, and end, which is important for reading comprehension. This is a fun way to show how it works! Guest post by Miss Charlette.

Act Out Some Fun!

When they were little, my two daughters loved to play Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

It could happen any morning we had oatmeal. One of the girls got to be Goldilocks (it was important to remember who’d been Goldie last!) and the rest of us were the three bears. We bears went for a walk, usually in the dining room. Goldilocks came in, tried each bowl of porridge, tried all the chairs and turned one over (to take the place of breaking one!) and finally, tucked into a cozy little bed. The bears, hot on her trail, found the oatmeal sampled, the chairs disarranged, and every bed slept in! At the end the bears “discovered” the visitor, who jumped up and made a mad dash from the bedroom, shrieking and giggling with every step.

We had so much fun! What we didn’t realize at the time was that this favorite activity was helping build a skill that would later be important to reading comprehension: narrative skills. You can’t act out the story in just any order and make it work; some things must come first, and other things only make sense if they come later.

For our little ones, playing is learning. If you’re looking for a fresh way to have fun together, pick a simple story your child knows well, and play out your own family version. Need to refresh your memory on some classic stories? We have plenty at the library. (A lovely traditional retelling of Goldilocks is by Janice Russell; a sassier one is by James Marshall.)

A great thing about this is that the learning happens as a natural byproduct of the fun, but don’t tell the kids. It can be your happy secret.

...Now, how about some porridge for breakfast? Guest post by Joyce F.

 

"Are You Awake?"

"Mm-mm. No." responds the mom in this story to her pajama-clad visitor.  Edward pries her eye open and asks a string of questions along the lines of, "Why is it dark? Why is it still nighttime? Why hasn't the sun come up yet? Why is it Tuesday?..." You get the picture. 

The dialogue is comical and authentically conveys a little boy impatiently waiting for his father, an airline pilot, to arrive home.  This is a perfect choice for any toddler or preschooler with a parent who works at night, or travels frequently. 

P.S. Don't forget to set an alarm (maybe not the toddler-pulling-your-eyelid kind) about Winter Storytime Registration next Monday, January 9th! 

I Want My Hat Back

It is red and pointy, and frankly, the weather is getting nasty, so it is very important I find it.  This is essentially bear's dilemma.  Bear looks a bit more like an over-sized otter to me, but who am I to question the masterfully wry illustrations of Jon Klassen.  At any rate, this otter-ish looking bear queries an assortment of forest animals as to the whereabouts of his beloved hat.  They all agree they have not seen the accessory in question. 

Astute preschoolers will notice that a certain bunny is sporting a suspiciously red-ish, pointy-ish hat, but it takes Bear a few more pages to remember this detail about the guilty rabbit.  In a climax that may leave some in shock and others rolling on the floor, bear indeed reclaims his hat, and errr..."dispenses" with the rabbit.  When squirrel embarks on a similar journey, this time searching for the now-missing rabbit, bear swears, "I haven't seen any rabbits." 

This is surely a book that preschoolers, once they are in on the joke, will want to share with others, waiting eagerly to see their reaction when they discover what bear has done.  This is also an excellent choice for readers in early elementary grades learning about reading and writing dialogue, as each of the animal's lines appear in a different color.  If stories of comeuppance aren't your cup of tea, pass on this one.  Personally, I think the rabbit had it coming.

All this chicken wants to do is help!

Poor Deborah Freedman is almost finished with a lovely picture book when a little chicken from her drawing wants to help by painting the barn blue.  An ink pot spills paint all over little chicken and the picture book pages, turning the ducklings, a disgruntled cat and a very alarmed cow a bold shade of blue.  The concept of picture book characters coming alive propels this mad-cap mess across beautiful full-bleed pages to the jar of water used by the "helpful" chicken to wash off the book and his farmyard friends. 

Freedman's originality and expressive illustrations make this title perfect for using to take a picture book walk with your child.  This reading technique is great for using with younger children and involves talking about what is happening on each page based on the pictures before worrying about the words in the story.  Take a walk with Blue Chicken and you and your little one might be inspired to do water colors of your own!

No puppets? No problem.

Imaginative play is one of the most meaningful and effective ways to teach children...it's also fun and inexpensive (let's face it, those last two seal the deal for me).  You don't need elaborate puppets like the ones made by Folkmanis, (although they make great gift suggestions for grandparents who tend toward toys of the noisy and plastic variety). 

You can make almost any book into story pieces with your computer (or one of the library's if your printer is like mine and always seems to be out of magenta) and some laminate or clear packing tape.  Books with familiar characters or repeating refrains work best for this type of play, and free clip art images are a cinch to find online. 

Example: Today in storytime I handed an animal to each child and we did a group retelling of Bill Martin's classic, Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?  The children helped "tell" the story by bringing up the animals placing them on our easel.  Making a game out of stories like this one can help children understand and remember the parts in a story. 

If a duckling grows and becomes a duck,

can a car grow and become...a truck?  Do You Know Which One Will Grow? is perfect for the perpetually inquisitive kids in your family.  The analogies and rhyming predictions will keep your young one guessing while the lift the flap format makes each page unique. 

Rhyming books that encourage children to guess the rhyme based on context clues are great for both phonological awareness AND comprehension.

Me...Jane

You Tarzan?  No, you blog-reader-who-is-most-likely-tired-of-my-nerdy-introductions.  Thanks for indulging me anyway.  I promise this book is worth the corny 1930's movie reference.   Bound and illustrated to look more like a young naturalist's journal, this is much more than just the story of Jane Goodall. It chronicles her early childhood and the sense of excitement she felt when she discovered things about the natural world around her.  It even ends with a photograph of the real Jane and a chimpanzee friend.

This is a perfect picture book for nature lovers and anyone with a passion for exploring!  Try making a nature journal with your child and recording the observations you make around your neighborhood.  Using  exciting experiences like outdoor adventures to practice reading and writing with your child can help prevent summer learning loss.

This route is a hoot.

Now that the threat of snow doesn't dampen your every outdoor excursion, put Saturday, April 16th on your calendar.  Owlexander's Hoot Route is an interactive literacy trail created by the library and the Centerville Washington Parks District and funded by the Yeck Family Foundation.  Read Owlexander's story as you enjoy an outdoor hike in Grant Park, exciting games, and literacy activities. 

This trail is a great way to involve active children in a reading experience that will hold their attention while helping to improve their narrative and vocabulary skills. 

Check out the awesome costumed character planning to visit the library tomorrow!