Hey, teachers! 👋

Reading stories has long been one of the key resources for learning English, as it provides a natural, interesting context. When we read to children, we are encouraging their imagination, exploring other cultures and teaching them about the world. Listening to and participating in stories also develops a range of linguistic, psychological, cognitive, social and cultural skills. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to make storytelling with your English language learners a regular part of your routine.

Nowadays, there are so many wonderful stories for children, but not all of them are suitable for learning a language. Before choosing a story for classroom work with YL, we suggest reviewing the characteristics you should pay attention to first:

🔹 repeated words and expressions;
🔹 rhyming;
🔹 easy to perform sequence;
🔹 illustrations that help to understand the text;
🔹 interesting characters;
🔹 humor and various events;
🔹 exciting resolution with the appropriate conclusion;
🔹 appropriate length for age group and level;
🔹 topic and content that are relevant or related to the syllabus.

We recommend One Stop Drama Shop and Andrew Articles and Stories as sources we use to teach young students and teens. There are lots of stories to teach new vocabulary and even role-play with students. Our young students really like them.

How to spark interest

If you are not passionate about the book you are reading, your students will not be thrilled either, so always be enthusiastic. Of course, you need to prepare the learners before reading the story, provide them with so-called language support. To do this, you can show your students the cover and ask them what ideas they have about the story based on the pictures on the cover, for example. If the students have already read this story or heard about it, you can ask them to remember as many facts as possible about the main characters and so on.

How to use stories

🟡  Story sequencing

Students work in groups and identify the key stages of the story they are going to illustrate. Distribute a sheet of paper to each group and ask them to draw lines to divide the sheet into blocks of the same size. Students draw something that presents the key stages of the story in each block. Depending on the level (grade), students can even write a sentence under each picture. They take turns telling the story to the other group based on the drawings they have created. You can ask students to cut each block separately and, dividing the pieces between the group members, retell the stories one by one, showing their pictures in the correct order.

🟡  ‘Lift the flap’ book

Divide students into several groups and prepare one copy of the story for each group. Each group member selects a word from the page of the book and copies it on a piece of paper (post-it note). As the teacher, you can supervise the words the students choose to make sure they are simple to illustrate, understand, and without repetition

Students prepare small illustrations of the words they have chosen and stick their stickers in place of the printed words in the story. Then the groups exchange their "encrypted" texts and try to read the stories, guessing the words from the stickers.

🟡  Storyboarding

After reading the story aloud, instruct the students. They have to choose between 5-10 key points in the story, and then recreate these scenes with their body language and facial expressions or other props (if your class is very large, you can choose more key points and assign roles to each student). Take photos of each scene, upload the photos to your computer, and print them out. Students can share images with each other and retell stories using their own photos. Alternatively, students can write a short description under their photos. You can also create a book with your own photos instead of illustrations.

You can get even more information and handy examples from our recent webinar "How to use stories in the classroom”

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