Find resources / Activities / Telling Stories Activity

Sharing oral stories with tamariki is a great way to:

• Encourage creativity and imagination
• Include your tamaiti in the creation of the story
• Show them that stories can be made up anytime or anywhere
• Reduce the reliance of devices for entertainment
• Improve their listening skills and extend their vocabulary
• Use the mother tongue of your whānau
• Share whānau memories
• Stay connected with whānau who don’t live nearby by including them in it
• Preserve culture by sharing whakapapa and whānau values and tikanga
• Talk through topics that could be worrying tamariki
• Identify what your tamaiti might need and personalize your story in response. For example:
  • Is it a calming story to help them settle to sleep?
  • Is it to uplift them if they’ve experienced something sad or upsetting recently?
  • Or is it one to just cuddle up and have a laugh together?

The beauty is you get to control all aspects of the story when you tell your own!

You could…

• Create the story together by asking your tamaiti what they’d like this story to be about?
• Discuss who the characters might be and develop them by talking about their looks, how they behave, what they like to do or things that might make them feel scared
• Share a familiar story they know from a book
• Create your own whānau version of a familiar story
• Make all the characters people from within your whānau
• Make the story up based on a happy memory from your childhood
• Share a story you liked when you were a child
• Personalize the story by making it about something your tamaiti enjoys doing or is trying to master
• Retell something that happened during the day into a story for the evening
• Think about the things that make your tamaiti frightened and then have the main character face and overcome the same fears.
• If need be have some prepared starters, for example:
  • ‘the day you came into our whānau…’         
  • ‘when we slept at our marae…’
  • ‘the day the river flooded…’