Everyone loves a good story. Reading brings back pleasant memories of being read to by parents or others. Literacy is encouraged when students are continually exposed to stories and books. Teachers can encourage students to discover their parents' favorite stories and share them with the class. In this article, the authors recommend the use of…

Stories are one means of communication between people of all ages. The telling of stories or listening to them is a part of a tradition as old as human experience. This guide gives practical advice, curriculum suggestions, and story examples for teachers interested in using storytelling with young children. The following are the sections: (1)…

Gail Carr, a classroom teacher, and Rosalind Flynn, a drama specialist, have found that drama learning strategies can be applicable to many curriculum areas, especially literature. The teacher must take part, according to Carr and Flynn, by maintaining the drama in motion by questioning, challenging, organizing the group's thought, focusing on the…

This book of nature activities for all ages is a sequel to "Sharing Nature with Children," and provides a fuller development of the Flow Learning system of nature awareness. Flow Learning is intended to help teachers, parents, or nature guides tune into a group's level of enthusiasm and lead them into energized, enjoyable appreciation of…

A study investigated the use of story impressions as a prereading writing activity to determine the story comprehension and recall of 96 seventh- and eighth-grade students. Students in the experimental group were given a set of story-relevant "impressions" (clue words) prior to reading a narrative passage and were asked to formulate a…

Directed towards kindergarten and primary school teachers, this manual outlines strategies that will lead new teachers to a deeper understanding of the skills required of them in story-time and provides experienced teachers with a source of continuing reference. The manual will also serve teachers' needs for story reading and story telling with…

The story time activity for kindergartners can be enhanced by involving the children in creative movement, puppets, plays, sequence cards, and felt figures. (JH)

This study of dimensions of variation in preschool teachers' classroom talk involved 10 white, middle-class, experienced teachers in developmental classes. Audio recordings and observations were made of 30 minutes of free play time, 5 minutes of transition time, and 25 minutes of group time. For 8 of the teachers, group time included 10 minutes of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of gender and three modes of story reconstruction training on second-grade students' story comprehension. Thirty-six children were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: drawing, discussion, and thematic-fantasy play. On three separate occasions, students were read books and participated…

To examine the effectiveness of various writing devices, a study used Richard Carter's Signalled Stopping Technique (SST) to compare these devices as used in two student-authored science stories. The SST indicates how messages are mentally processed, and uses the following seven stops: (1) C (confusion); (2) R (reread); (3) Q (question); (4) T…

Part of a series entitled "Traditional Literature and Folklore in Library and Storytelling Programs," this annotated bibliography was produced by graduate students in the Traditional Literature and Oral Narration class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The bibliography is designed to provide librarians and teachers with information…

This study shows that children can quickly learn and retain many new undefined vocabulary words when the words are introduced in meaningful, familiar sentences and stories. (Author/DEP)

Tracing the development of "concept of story" in one child from age three years to five years using the language experience task, a hierarchy of text/context relationships emerges. First there is the inventory stage whereby the child names and describes behaviors to objects. The second stage is descriptive and the child modifies the object and the…

Stories were read to 62 male third grade children from two elementary schools in Urbana, Illinois. They were randomly assigned to one of four story conditions: vicarious role playing, symbolic modeling, a combination of the two, and a control condition. The basis of the present experiment is the assumption that vicarious role playing is similar to…

Thirty-four fourth-grade students participated in a study of the way in which children acquire frameworks used to recall and encode stories. The study tested the hypotheses that children have a consistent preference for a story structure node in which they identify narrative events as comprising plausible story themes, that the framework generated…