A storybook plan
It’s easy to pick up a storybook and read it to your young learners. However, to get the best out of the experience for them and you, there should be proper planning made beforehand. In this lesson, we’ll look over what you should do when using a storybook in your lessons.
Decisions to be made before the lesson
Before introducing any storybook, there are some critical decisions you need to make. The first is: How will I deliver this story the first time?
When introducing the story to young learners for the first time, some teachers like to keep up the long-standing tradition of storytelling by narrating the story to the children without the storybook.
This method has shown to be especially popular with young learners. They will have your full attention and won’t be pointing to the illustrations or discussing them with their friends.
This requires a certain amount of preparation on your part – just as you would do for any presentation. To get it right first time, you’ll want to rehearse several times beforehand – perhaps in front of a mirror or in front of your friends or family.
While it takes time to prepare, the benefits are significant:
- You will not be constricted by looking at the storybook and holding it. As a result, you will be able to maintain full eye contact with the children and have the opportunity to be much more animated with your expressions and gestures. You may occasionally show an illustration of what the character looks like, e.g., the Gruffalo, but wouldn’t rely on the book to tell the actual story.
- By telling the story rather than reading it from the book, you’ll be looking at your students every second. You’ll be more aware of all the children’s reactions, and will be able to make swift decisions on pace or repetition of a phrase, or the heightening of the volume.
- By only pointing to a few illustrations on this occasion, you will whet their appetite and anticipation for more illustrations during your next reading.
Whether you opt for telling or reading the story when introducing it, you will still need to do some dry-runs yourself to identify:
- Areas where you will change your pace or volume
- Where you may stop to ask any questions (although you may wish to leave this till the second reading)
- Words or phrases or sentences which need to be simplified
- Any bits which are long-winded or peripheral and which need to be adapted or removed.
What to do during the lesson
There are usually three stages in reading or telling a story: the pre-storytelling stage, the during-storytelling stage, and the after-storytelling stage.
Pre-storytelling stage
This is the first warm-up stage before you actually start reading the story.
In the pre-storytelling stage, you:
- Prepare the young learners so that they can better comprehend the story.
- Raise their interest and motivation, so that their attention is focused on the story.
- Set the scene and create the context for the story so that the young learners can draw on their existing knowledge and experiences, where possible, to better understand the story.
- Explain any new and critical lexis to make it easier for them.
Sometimes it will be helpful to show them an illustration before you read the story. For example, the Gruffalo is not quite like any other animal, so it’s probably better to let them see what he looks like at the start.
A Gruffalo puppet would be even better, and you could show him upfront and use him during your reading. This would be a great prop to activate interest and motivation.
During-storytelling stage
Some teachers like to do a straight telling or reading of the story the first time without any pausing or repetitions. That’s fine, as after doing an initial reading you might choose to then ask: “Would you like to hear it again, children?” and then go through with more focus on language learning opportunities.
In this second reading, the aim is to ensure that your students are active participants in the process and not just passive listeners.
Here you will have prepared a range of techniques and activities, all designed to help them understand the story better, and all designed to maintain their interest and attention.
These could include:
- Asking the young learners to guess or predict what comes next.
- Identifying the characters and their prominent traits.
- Looking at big illustrations (or copies you have handed out to them) to discuss characters or the setting.
- Why did she do that? Types of questions.
Children love humor, so ensure you ask them some silly things too: “Have you ever seen a Gruffalo on the school bus? Why not?”
On some occasions, your questions will be just to ensure that your students get fun interaction from the story.
On other occasions, you will also be helping them to understand the story. However, you may also be doing some assessment work, e.g., who noticed what and who didn’t, who chose the right word and who didn’t, who had difficulty pronouncing a word or uttering a sound and who didn’t, etc.
For example: If you feel it’s the right time to introduce them to alliteration, you might show them an example and explain what it is and later read out another example to see who notices it and who doesn’t.
Stories are also excellent vehicles for getting them to notice little bits of grammar.
For example: In The Very Hungry Caterpillar, there are excellent opportunities for helping them to spot the letter “s” at the end of words when there is more than one of them:
- On Monday, he ate through one apple.
- On Tuesday, he ate through two pears.
The illustrations will also help them to notice the difference.
There are other activities you can do, which involve movement and action. These activities encourage students to listen very carefully.
An example here could be in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, where lots of types of fruit and other food are mentioned. You could give each learner a card which represents one type of fruit or one kind of food. When they hear their item mentioned, they stand up quickly, run to your desk, put their card in a box, and run back fast to their position.
You could also have the students mime out certain parts of a story. Once you have read the story several times, and they know the actions of the characters, they will be very willing to act out the story as you read it.
You can use the same types of activities with older young learners. Lots of older young learners like the telling of a story by you as opposed to you reading it. Older learners can also read stories on their own at times, and here you can assist them with activities such as story timelines, predictions, lists of character traits, etc.
Post-storytelling stage
After listening to the story or a part thereof, you should always encourage the learners to express their feelings and emotions as best they can.
Keep your reflection questions simple:
- What do you like best? Why?
- What do you think of the Gruffalo? Why
- Do you like the Gruffalo? Why? Why not?
- Would you like a Gruffalo as a pet?
- Do you like the same food as the Very Hungry Caterpillar? Why? Why Not?
- So, you like eating a leaf too?
This will help you to assess if they’ve enjoyed the story and, more importantly, what they’ve learned/understood from it.
After this, you’ll want to plan further activities to help consolidate what they’ve learned. In the next lesson we’ll look at some further activities that you could use.