STORYTELLING TO TEACH CONCEPTS

                                 (In picture: Jayanthi Kannan, Founder, D.K.'s Learning Centre)

Story telling can be used to teach concepts too. Once we attempted to teach afforestation and deforestation to class 4 students. We planned to have a puppet show. We had characters like monkey, elephant, birds and a human. Students of higher classes helped us make these puppets.

We had the puppet show in the morning assembly. The tiny tots of our school thought something was happening behind the screen. They came running and were jumping with joy.

The difference in intonation and voice change created a lot of interest and involvement among children. When we went back to class and when there was discussion in the classroom there was 100 percent involvement.

We also use stories to teach phonetics, concepts in geography, etc. This is a small one line story to remember the names of planet: madam viji Eats mangoes and jhelabis sitting under a neem tree.

We always see teaching as an art. We came to a realization that evolving in the ways of teaching is very important for a teacher. We take it as a challenge to come up with innovative ideas promoting a child’s interest and involvement in his/ her academics. In fact compromising on teaching is compromising of quality future generation. Teaching should not be clichéd but contemporary. 

STORYTELLING TO TEACH SPELLING

Stories form an integral part of human society, be it a child or a youth story can be a motivation factor. This art is a fascinating art and can be used for developmental programmes, depicting joy, sorrow or the bravery of a person.

In ancient times, Vishnusharma, a minister in a kingdom, wanted to mend the ways of the foolish princes to make them fit to rule the country. He told them a story each day installing a moral in each. This has been compiled to for the legendary Panchatantra stories.

As special educators and a lover of storytelling, we here in D.K.’s have been using this form to teach spellings for children with dyslexia. This has proved to be very effective. We were trying to teach the spellings of the days of the week to these children. The amount of work put in teaching the spelling of “Tuesday” proved ineffective and was in vain. Then, we thought of creating a story for it. It struck immediately and there came the mind-boggling story:

There was a teashop(T). and a man who always roamed with an umbrella(U) came to the shop. He wanted to eat an omelette so he said “oru egg podu pa”(E). when the shopkeeper cracked the egg there came out a snake(S).

TEASHOP   UMBRELLA   EGG   SNAKE

The same way for Thursday: the same man went to the Tshop and started sneezing “Hutch Hutch”. The shop keeper said “U R Stupid”.

TEASHOP HUTCH U R STUPID

The same man went on Saturday and SAT on a bench in the same shop. The shopkeeper came running and swore “you are……U R……”

SAT UR day

This is a small attempt in teaching through story telling.

This became a lot more interesting to the kids and till now these kids as grown-up students recall the same story to remember the spellings of the days.