Stories are us – PARENTING LESSON in nutshell – Part 2

Tell stories to your children. Inculcate the joy of reading in them. Stories are very powerful tool to convey message. A kid’s life is full of stories.

Let’s talk about the popular ones and lessons we can derive from them:

Hare and the Tortoise
Fox and Crane
Crocodile and the monkey
Fox and the grapes
Money and the cap seller

Morals:
Slow and steady wins the race
Tit for tat
Don’t be greedy
Grapes are sour
Child like animals copy our behaviour

Every story teaches us values. While stories entertain, we can derive morals that stick with the children all through their life. The point is these are stories we learn and they have morals.
Every story did.

Parenting tip: Read and tell stories to your children

“The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children,” a Commission on Reading report found.

The benefits are so profound, and kids form so much of their intelligence potential during the early years of their life, that experts recommend reading aloud to your child as soon as he or she is born, and continuing indefinitely.

Grandmother’s story telling skills

As kids, we always have seen an image of a lovely grand-mom sitting with a knitting wool and weaving stories for us. Stories of strange lands and fairies. Of ghost and witches. Of adventures that make us want one. Well, we may have been lucky to have a grand-parent like that too.

Stories let us live in a world of fantasy, explores our imagination and make us want to be one of the heroes. Open a book, and you will be transported to the same world of imagination.

Reading is a conversation with the lost grandmother.

Reading leads to more open conversation. For example, reading a book about the evil king can lead to talk on justice over dinner. And as you gain confidence talking about the morals, they don’t look like preaching when mixed well with stories. You would even mention that what would be do when given an opportunity to be a king: be a just ruler or an evil one?

Parenting tip: Reading to kids helps them with language and speech development.

Action Step:Use the “five-finger rule.” Have your child open the book to any page in the middle of the book and read that page. Each time she comes across a word she does not know, she should hold up a finger. If she gets to five fingers before she finishes reading the page, the book is too hard. If she doesn’t hold up any fingers, the book is probably easy for your child and can be used to build reading fluency. If she holds up two or three fingers, the book is likely to be at a good level for her reading to grow.

⦁ Curiosity, creativity and imagination are all developed while being read to.

Parenting tip: Move over the Avengers, we have our ‘real stories’ than teach ‘real values’.
Pick up stories from the life of Bethany Hamilton, Yusra Mardini or Roger Federer.

Off the TV diet

Gem: TV– If two letters can have the child glued so much, imagine what an entire set of 26 letters can do? READ to your child!

There no better way than to stay off from TV and Mobile – Books
While most of our children and parents too, prefer a baby sitter called Television or Mobiles, the effects of reading are long lasting than a diet of cartoons and soaps.
TV, by itself is not wrong. Rather you can use it to explore or initiate the curious.

Action Step: Watch a cartoon set in Tokyo and then challenge the child to find 5 new things about the city. It can be how is their home different from ours, or what language they speak in Japan, dress and appearances or as ordinary as what is a ‘sushi?’

Action Step: Have a book in hand that gives the information on the TV soap.
Example use the amazing site http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/ to explore more

Gem: Reading online is as good as reading in print.

Action Step: Subscribe to the magazine that are associated with online or television viewing. The experience is magical. And the child finds a reason to read.

Talking About Stories

It’s often a good idea to talk about a story you’re reading, but you needn’t feel compelled to talk about every story. Good stories will encourage a love for reading, with or without conversation. And sometimes children need time to think about stories they’ve read. A day or so later. Don’t be surprised if your child mentions something from a story you’ve read together.

Action Step: Children can be taught about deeper issues like ‘death’ or ‘divorce’ through stories and prepare them for life.

Parenting tip: Reading is all about ‘experience’

After all, if a student struggles to put together words and sentences, how can he be expected to grasp the math, science,

and social concepts he’ll be presented with when he begins elementary school?

Gem: We remember stories and forget statistics. Tell stories to your children.

I leave you with two more ‘golden’ action steps.

Action Step: Get a membership to a reading library or a book club. No better way than to engage in peer learning.

⦁ The best way to utilize a library membership is to make a routine every week. Challenge the child to pick up her favourite book and make it an evening task to read together.
⦁ Prepare a quiz or a puzzle on story, to keep the child excited.
⦁ Have badges for every book that is read, returned and has the quiz completed.
⦁ Have a cake party for 20 badges.

Action Step: Heard of marathon, right! Now come over Read-a-thon. This popular concept is all about reading as long as possible deep into the book.

This is about quantity and as with a marathon, the more your read, the more vocabulary and reading stamina does a child build.

About the Writer

Dawood Vaid is an avid reader, a teacher trainer and an author. His book ‘The Education Riddle‘ and ‘TALK‘ are available on Amazon. Dawood has completed the certificate course on ‘Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills’ by The University of Melbourne. An engineer and an MBA, he leads the curriculum development team at Sky Education, with focus on establishing Skill labs across schools. He resides in Mumbai and can be contacted at [email protected]