• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Banter Speech & Language

Banter Speech & Language

Sydney speech pathologists helping adults and children speak for themselves.

  • Home
  • Our Speech Pathologists
  • Shop
    • Speech
    • Language
    • Stuttering
    • Reading
    • Decodable Readers
    • Writing
    • Primary School
    • High School
    • Online resources
    • Business Templates
    • NDIS Templates
    • NDIS Training
  • Cart
  • Banter Supervision
  • Contact Us
  • Show Search
Hide Search
You are here: Home / Language / Let kids choose their own adventures

Let kids choose their own adventures

David Kinnane · 10 November 2014 · Leave a Comment

I love story-telling.  That’s why I wrote a novel.

But, as a speech-language pathologist, there are other reasons I love stories:

  • there’s a strong link between the ability to understand and tell stories and later literacy and academic success (Paris & Paris, 2003);
  • young children with language delays have great difficulty making up stories;
  • narrative skills are linked with reading comprehension; and
  • once kids have learned how they work, stories provide an easy way for them to comprehend and recall facts (Hudson & Nelson, 1983).

We know that repeated story-telling and/or explicit teaching about how to make up stories improves children’s narrative skills (Peterson, 2011).  To develop story-telling skills, we often start by giving them a blueprint for making stories.  Lots of blueprints exist but, in plain English, most of them boil down to the following parts:

  1. Setting: when and where the story takes place.
  2. The main character: who the story is about.
  3. Something happens to start things off.
  4. Problem: the kick-off event creates a problem for the main character, which the main character responds to in an effort to get what the main character wants (the goal).
  5. Solution: the main character struggles over various obstacles to achieve (or not achieve) the goal.
  6. Resolution: the main character reacts to the solution, and the consequences of the solution.

If you think about it, most stories – from Hansel and Gretel to Zac Power to Frozen follow this basic plan.

Now a very recent study tells us something important – and exciting – about how to teach children story-making:

If you give the child some choice about what happens when making up a story, they learn about story-making much better than children who are simply told the story.

As a parent, this makes intuitive sense to me.  If I give my kids some choice about what they are doing – e.g. Mathletics or Spellodrome, for example – they tend to be more engaged and stick with it longer.  This is exactly the observation that led Khan and colleagues down the path of teaching story blueprints to kids by letting them decide what happens.

They studied two groups of kids learning about stories.  The first group had no choice about what happened in the story lesson – they were simply told the story, with the teacher labeling each of the story elements as they went.  The second group were given a choice of two possibilities for each of the 6 story elements.

So what happened?

When asked to re-tell other stories, the kids in the “choice” group:

  • included more elements in their stories when re-telling a story;
  • answered more comprehension questions correctly; and
  • included more information in their stories,

than the kids who weren’t given a choice.

Bottom line

Speech pathologists, teachers and parents should get children engaged in story activities by giving them choices about what happens when teaching them the parts of stories.

As my clients know, I do this by giving them a blueprint, then co-creating a story where they get to decide what happens for each of the elements of the story.  It can take a bit more preparation and creativity – but it’s worth it if it helps language-delayed kids learn story-making and to improve their comprehension.

Parent resources

No time or energy to come up with ideas to help your child choose their own stories?  Here are some books recommended by Carol Westby:

  • Aunt Isabel Tells a Good One, by Kate Duke
  • From Pictures to Words: A Book about Making a Book, by Janet Stevens
  • Choose Your Own Adventure

Main source: Carol Westby (2014). Offering Choices in Narrative Intervention. Word of Mouth, 26:2 November/December; in turn summarising Khan, K., Nelson., K., & Whyte, E. (2014). Children choose their own stories: The impact on choice on children’s learning of new narrative skills. Journal of Child Language, 41, 949-962.

Related resources:

  • Free Story Builder to help kids choose their own adventures
  • The Story Wizards’ Master Story Builder

Image: http://tinyurl.com/mmhjrb4

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn
  • Email

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Related

Language, Literacy narrative skills, story-making, story-telling

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Get in touch

115 Queen Street
North Strathfield NSW Australia
(02) 87573838
hello@banterspeech.com.au
Monday-Friday: 8.30am to 5.30pm
Saturday: 7.30am to 2.30pm
Closed Sundays and public holidays

Shop at our store

  • Australian SLP Employment Agreement Full Time Australian Employment Agreement Template for Speech Pathologists (Full-time) $95.00 including GST
  • Listen then speak 8 Listen then Speak 8: an oral language workout for students in Years 2-5 $5.99 including GST
  • Basic English Core Vocabulary Barrier Activity: Verbs 1 $3.50 including GST
  • client questionnaire for children and adolescents Client questionnaire for children and adolescents $12.00 including GST
  • Narrative Language Workout for Young Primary Schoolers: The Crow and the Pitcher, a Fable by Aesop $5.99 including GST
  • Polysyllabic Words: My Dad Does Several Silly Things Decoding Polysyllabic Words in Sentences: My Dad Does Several Silly Things $3.99 including GST
  • Think then Write Foundations: Simple Sentence Writer 2: Subject-Verb-Complement and Subject-Verb-Object Sentences $5.99 including GST
  • Motor-speech stories for articulation movements Pack 5: Dental-Alveolar $3.99 including GST

Store categories

March Featured Resource

  • Blanks 4: Language comprehension booster: What could you do when..? $4.99 including GST

Recent articles

  • For students with spelling difficulties, where should we start?
  • Five ways to help 11-14 year-old students to improve their vocabularies for school and life
  • New Scatter-Slayer Adventure: The Awesome Australian Gore-Boar
  • Can technology-based interventions help children with reading difficulties?

Featured Articles

What do you think about when you think about speech pathology?

Ask Us Anything: 17 things our readers and followers really want to know about speech pathology (but were too shy to ask)!

Language therapy works. But can we make it better?

Stuttering: what do we mean by ‘recovery’?

Lifting the lid on speech therapy: How we assess and treat children with unclear speech – and why

Too many children can’t read. We know what to do. But how should we do it?

I want to help my late talker to speak, but I’m stuck at home. What can I do?

Free Resources

Big book of child speech pathology answers

Getting ready to read at big school

Is your kindy kid really reading

The Scatter-Slayer Adventures

Free decodable: Book 1 of The Scatter-Slayer Adventures. The first in our decodable digital ‘select-your-sequel’ series for reluctant readers, aged 7-12.

Get our free resource

Subscribe to receive our blog articles

Check out our therapy and provider resources Go to our shop

Banter Speech & Language

Copyright © 2021 · BANTER SPEECH & LANGUAGE PTY LIMITED ·

  • Articles
  • Shop
  • Cart
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Non-necessary

Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.

SAVE & ACCEPT
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.