Nursery World - EYFS Best Practice: All about ... children's storymaking

By allowing children to take a leading role in the telling of
stories, we can support them to think logically and make sense of the
world. Nancy Stewart explains.

Whether with a toddler on your knee, a few children grouped around a picture book, or through the use of puppets, reading a story together is a special time. Sharing stories with children holds an important place in the rich provision of the early years.

But stories are not a one-way affair, passed only from adults to children, and we are missing an important key if we don't turn the tables and make the adults story listeners. Recent theories point to children's own storymaking as playing a central role in learning and development from the earliest stages.

Children have an inborn drive to develop their own stories about their experiences and feelings, and their brains are built for it. When we work with children as the storytellers, we are responding to and supporting their inborn powers to make sense of the world, to think logically, and to understand themselves and others.

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