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Story Telling and its Role in Right Brain Development

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This is a simple four step story. It is inspired from the Bubbles First Storybook series (which we use extensively at Morning Glorie, preschool in Gurgaon and online preschool in India). It is simple, packed full of values (as we discussed in our earlier post on Stories for Values and Good Habits in Children), familiar and lots of fun, especially when when we add picture cards (like the ones shown above) or simple props (a monkey puppet, a banana, a plant to depict nature and so on) for visual appeal. 

These and many such simple stories form part of our learning program. But take one step further into analysing the story, and go back to the very first sentence of this post. It is a four STEP story - the story is the sum total of the number of steps, and the order that they appear in. When you look at a story in this way, you realise that story telling is an excellent tool to help build recall in children. This helps exercise and activate the right side of the brain - recall is a part of right brain development.

A simple illustration of how we use this technique - also called right brain development through the use of oral sequence (we introduce this activity as early as 2 years of age) - is used at Morning Glorie's preschool in Gurgaon and online preschool in India.

STEP 1

Narrate the story (for children under 3 years of age, we also use visual aids for effective communication, while for older children, we just do an oral narration) at a slow pace. This ensures that children have some time to process sequence of events.

STEP 2

Repeat the story at a fast pace. When we do this, the brain is processing auditory input into a more visual input which gets stored in the brain.

STEP 3

Revisit the story by asking questions. This can be done in many ways. To illustrate, take the above story. You can ask your child to recall the steps. You can ask leading questions like what is the name of the monkey? Where did he go? Who did he go with? What was he eating? What did he do with the peel? And so on.

The children tap into the visual information they had stored into their brain, and use that to recall the relevant information and sequence of events. 

This is a very basic right brain development activity. With time, and as children are more ready, we increase the level of complexity of the stories - both in the number of steps involved and the nature of information present. This helps activate and exercise the right side of the brain for children.

Story telling for right brain development is a very important part of our learning methodology - both in our preschool in Gurgaon and online preschool in India. While we start these activities with children as young as 2 years of age, we find these activities work well for older children as well, and incorporate them in our Eggheads program for kids up to 7 years of age.

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Next Up - The Use of Please and Excuse Me in Our Children's Vocabulary



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