Hyderabad: Every year on March 20, World Storytelling Day celebrates the art of oral storytelling. It’s also a day for people around the globe to listen and tell stories in as many languages as possible.
Theme of World Storytelling Day 2024: Each year World Storytelling Day has a theme around which the storytellers tell their stories. The storytellers are free to choose their stories, but most of them try to connect to the theme. The theme of World Storytelling Day 2024 is 'Building Bridges'.
History of World Storytelling Day: World Storytelling Day started out as a national day for storytelling in Sweden around 1991. The day was called 'Alla berättares dag,' which translates to All Storytellers Day.
In 1997, storytellers in Australia coordinated a five-week long celebration of story. The day became known as the International Day of Oral Narrators. Around this time, Mexico and other Latin American countries were celebrating their own National Day of Storytellers. In 2002, Scandinavians created their own storytelling web-network called Ratatosk.
The new network helped the national day for storytelling spread from Sweden to Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Estonia. In 2003, the idea continued to spread to other countries including Canada. The event became known as World Storytelling Day. Today, storytelling events occur on every continent except Antarctica.
Benefits of Storytelling the benefits of story time in early childhood are numerous
- Story Reading For Kids Fosters Imagination: As the story unfolds, a child's imagination can run wild. In their heads, the story can take whatever shape they want it to take. While listening to you, they imagine the different characters and instances from the story. It enhances their creativity and opens them up to new possibilities. As they listen, they associate stories with images. It further develops their capacity to visualize and imagine.
- Enhances Listening Skills: Most often, your child may find it difficult to concentrate for extended periods of time. This is normal. However, storytelling for children can help capture their attention and also improve their listening skills.
- Improves Your Child’s Communication Skills: Storytelling encourages your child to express themselves. It increases their ability and willingness to express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings. It also enables children to ask the right questions and strike a good conversation, thus making them more confident.
- Enhances Focus and Social Skills: Storytelling encourages your child to actively listen and pay attention to what you have to say. Patience and focus, which they learn through the process, enable them to encounter aspects they haven’t before.
- Storytelling For Children Develops Reading Skills: Spending time regularly reading stories for children in English can help them get acquainted with the language. Short stories for kids with pictures create magic. Every image can tell short stories for children to read. In addition to building their vocabulary, it also encourages the child to interact with books and fosters enthusiastic readers for the future.
- Aids in Sharpening Your Child’s Memory: After reading out stories for children, ensure that you repeat or review them in different ways with your child. Combined with your child sharing their understanding of the story, it helps increase memory and improves concentration.
- Makes Learning Easier: Storytelling prepares and sets your child up for all future academic learning. An activity done frequently helps your child understand and enjoy what is read to them. It fuels curiosity which can further ensure that they don't catch on to the habit of rote memorisation.
- Reading For Kids Can Broaden Horizons: It creates a sense of belonging by familiarising them with their immediate cultures and surroundings. Storytelling can also open a whole new and different world for your child. Exposing them to different cultures and countries through your stories will develop their empathy as they broaden their understanding of the world.
While a regular routine of storytelling for children will instill a love for books in them, it also gives you time to bond with your child in a special way. Storytelling can be as simple as you reading bedtime stories for kids in English or sharing a story from your own life. This medium brings feeling and meaning into ideas that may not otherwise be as interesting at times. So add some drama, set the scene, have props and effects to draw your little ones into the story.
