The vision of the project is to help teachers present complex topics in an easy to understand way.
Teaching abstract concepts to preschool- and elementary-age children can be a challenge because they may not be developmentally able to grasp less concrete ideas. By the research, children have more and more problems with understanding complex data which is generally contributed to less visualizing. They do not read as often as once and are more inclined to videos and computer games, which they visualize for them.
Comprehension is even worsened with less reading and not good vocabulary and complex grammar. These factors influence their learning path and make understanding topics with a lot of data and abstract ideas difficult.
The next problem is a different level of development of children. Jane Healy of Your Child’s Growing Mind has found that “Children are all very different in the pace at which they master abstractions. So to expect a whole class of 8-year-olds to be able to grasp something at the same level is unreasonable.” We need to find a proper and valuable technique for every child.
Storytelling is an effective way to teach any topic and can be used for any type of learner – audio, visual and kinesthetic. Stories create a sense of connection with the listener so students become more open to learning with more engagement. Stories can also influence children’s reading habits with proper teacher support – like finding the end of the story in a certain book.
The specific goal of this project is to promote storytelling as an effective technique to use in the classroom, demonstrate the possibilities of the storytelling in classroom situations, teach what storytelling can do for the teacher and for the child, empower teachers with new educational methodology and develop easy to use framework that teachers can use to develop stories to better convey their knowledge regardless of the topic.
Our objectives are to develop a Storytelling Manual for teachers, containing easy to use storytelling framework to develop learning stories and examples of usage of the framework for different topics.