Imagine you were trying to tell someone about your day, but you jumped around from the first thing you did to the last thing, and back again, with no accounting for the time. That would be very confusing for the person listening to the story, right?
Narrative skills are understanding that a story has a beginning, middle and end. Events happen in a certain order to make something happen. Having strong narrative skills aids in comprehension, listening skills, and vocabulary, as well as developing strong reading skills, understanding time, cause and effect and connecting to others.
Your child is always learning, and children instinctively want to tell stories. Learning to tell stories develops their oral language skills which in turn has a direct effect on the speed and proficiency in which they learn to read (Roth, 1996). Read more about what narrative skills are and why they are so important to your child’s school success and some easy and practical ways to start working on those skills today. Narrative skills are also one of the important skills your child needs for school, read about the rest in this post.
Why are narrative skills important?
All the early literacy skills give your child the tools to learn to read and succeed in school, however out of the six of them, narrative skills may seem the most disconnected. After all, how does telling stories, an oral skill, connect to recognizing print, or developing vocabulary or knowing the alphabet? Narrative skills are largely an oral storytelling skill, so what does this have to do with print? The answer? Everything.
Narrative skills are one of the six early literacy skills your child needs to develop before kindergarten. It is part of learning to read and write, but it does more than that. A “narrative” is a spoken or written account of connected events (Oxford Dictionary), the emphasis on being “connected.” A “story” may have more associated with it than a simple narrative. If someone tells you a story, you expect it to take place at a set time, and place and to cover a particular event.
Your expectation may reasonably include a theme, some kind of problem, and a character who must follow chronological events to accomplish a task. Your child may tell you many random things throughout the day, facts they learned or observations, questions about the world and an endless stream of “what if” scenarios, but none of these are narratives.
They do not connect to each other, at least not in a cohesive way that other people will understand. But a child telling a story about themselves or a made-up character has a grasp of what it means to tell a story, and the basics of narrative skills. Because it is also largely an oral skill, it requires a different set of abilities, and yet children intuitively want to tell a story.
Having a grasp of a narrative means being able to describe things or events in a way that links to each other. It indicates at least some understanding of time: first this happened, then this happened, lastly this happened. It means your child has at least a basic grasp of the order of events, that some things happen before other things.
Developing strong narrative skills is arguably a safety issue as well. If a caregiver or investigator asks direct questions, children ages three to five should be able to provide at least some information about events that happen in a certain order (linear information). This skill naturally gets better as your child gets older, but it is a skill that can and should, be practiced early on. A study done in 2012 found that even children as young as three could provide some information. This is a situation where the narrative skill of sequencing is important outside of a strictly learning context.
Why does it matter if my child can tell a story?
Besides the obvious answer of, “it helps them learn to read” there are many other unique benefits to telling oral stories that are not found strictly in learning to read printed stories.
For example, this is a skill your child is observing and absorbing from a young age so that by the time your child is about three years old, they can recount at least some events in chronological order as well as tell some stories, even if those are only a few sentences long. Sharing stories aloud also:
- Improves vocabulary by learning new words
- Creates a more personal connection between you and your child by requiring eye contact and mirroring facial expressions
- Encourages imagination and creativity
- Cultural stories can help teach about family and culture
- Improves listening comprehension
Even if your child is too young to tell stories, they will benefit from hearing you tell them. Let’s look at how to practice narrative skills with your child.
How to Practice Narrative Skills with Books
Despite the fact that narrative skills are largely an oral skill, children with good narrative skills eventually learn to read with more proficiency than their peers (Roth, 2002), and there are ways to practice these skills with books. Let’s look at some ways to practice an oral language skill with picture books.
What will happen next?
Using an ‘open-ended question’ or a question that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” Think about the wh- questions: who, what, when, where and why. These will encourage your child to think about the answer longer and more completely than a simple “yes” or “no.” Open ended questions give them a chance to use more vocabulary words and think more broadly about the story, helping to build their comprehension and vocabulary skills.
When you are asking questions that require an answer beyond ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ wait 3-5 seconds for an answer. Your child’s brain is still processing the language and it may take longer for them to process your words, think about an answer and then process the language back out.
As an adult your ‘processing speed’ is very fast, but your child is just getting started. Think about how long it would take you to answer a complex question in a language you have only studied for one to two years- it might take you a few seconds longer than normal!
Remember that it is ok if your child can’t answer or doesn’t know, just start talking about the pictures in the book, what the character is doing or what the facial expressions indicate, or what is happening in the background. Or take a guess at what you think might happen next because of what just happened before and explain how you got to that answer.
Choose Books with Repetition
Choosing books with repetitive phrases cue that something will happen next that has happened before. Build your child’s confidence in story telling skills by starting out with books featuring repetitive phrases, rather than a longer story arc. Children’s picture books are full of these kinds of books.
When reading them, you can pause before the repetition your child knows will come next and ask them what they think will happen, repeating the ask-pause-answer model shown above. Read The Cow Loves Cookies by Karma Wilson, as the animals go through their favorite kinds of food, it always comes back to “But the cow loves cookies.” As you approach that line your child will anticipate it and you can pause and ask, “But what does the cow love?” and in time you will hear the enthusiastic reply of “cookies!”
Work with the repetition in the book and the enthusiasm of a reader who knows the words to have them say the repeated line at a certain time. Practice the line before you start reading, choose something short, and then when you read cue your child to say the repeated phrase.
Wordless Picture Books
You might be surprised to know that wordless picture books are actually quite popular. They feature beautiful illustrations that paint a clear story, but it is up to the reader to verbalize the story. This might seem like a challenge, and maybe it is not an “every night” kind of book at first. However, they are a great opportunity to let your child think about what is happening in the story by looking at the pictures and making their own connections and conclusions about what the illustrations mean.
As your child gets more comfortable “reading” the story, you may find yourself able to let them “read” you the whole story. As the images become more familiar, take time to point out what else may be going on in the scene and ask questions about it.
These kinds of stories provide a certain amount of flexibility in the reading. There is no structure to follow or reason to feel that the story is being interrupted if you pause. So take time to talk about the imagery, meanings of facial expressions, make animal sounds or search for context clues about the plot.
Try The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney, the illustrations are beautiful and paint a clear picture of the story’s plot. Take a moment before you start any book and look at the cover. Ask your child what they see, what shapes, what colors, and what they think the book might be about. There are three easy steps to reading wordless picture books that you can learn about in this post.
Sequential Stories
Try a sequential story. Sequential stories are where more than just a single phrase repeats, the story itself is a cycle. For example, if you were reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, you might say something like, “I think the mouse is going to want something else, because last time he asked for a glass of milk.”
Verbalizing this thought process models for your child how you came to that conclusion and how you are reading context clues to determine what might happen next. Then as you go through the story, have fun guessing what the Mouse might ask for next. Other examples include, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle and Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman.
How to Practice Narrative Skills with Play
Play is a powerful tool that children use to learn. It is how they process and work out the many things they learn, all day long. This can be a low-pressure time to practice narrative skills, and you are may even doing this already. Even children too young to verbally narrate the stories they are play-acting are demonstrating narrative skills with their actions and activities. Studies have shown that children use symbolic play (using one object to represent another, also called pretend play) and functional play (using an object for what it is) and gain much more from it when they play with an adult who can do the narrating and provide the words for them while they play.
You have probably seen and participated in this without even realizing it. All you have to do is give words to what your kid is doing while they play. Did your child put Dolly to bed? “Ah I see it’s time for Dolly’s nap. Because Dolly was sleepy, she needed to take a nap. You put her in the bed, and then put her blanket on, good job sweetie!” Or, “I see there was a race car pile-up! The cars were going very fast and then they had nowhere to go, so they all landed on top of each other! Wow, wasn’t that exciting!”
Another example might include working in a play kitchen. You might say something like, “First you put the cookies on the tray, then you put it in the oven, and now they are baked! Mmm, these cookies are tasty!” Your child is already doing the action, you are simply giving it words. Maybe it is something even simpler, how many times has your child held a block up to their head like a phone and you immediately pretended the phone was ringing and answered the block? All of these actions facilitate building narrative skills.
These things might be intuitive and natural for you to say, or you may have to think about it. But adding in these words to your child’s play helps them learn the words for the narratives, or stories, they are acting out. You are not only teaching your child the vocabulary they need, you are also teaching them that these actions happen in a sequence of events. Narrating play allows you and your child to interact together, builds bonding time, teaches them more vocabulary words and provides examples of a narrative structure.
How to Practice Narrative Skills at Home
Practicing narrative skills at home doesn’t have to be hard or complicated. You probably do many of these actions already, now it’s time to add in a little extra talking to help your child develop and expand their narrative skills.
Narrating events using first, next, last
When you do virtually any activity there are steps to follow. You likely do said activity so many times, you don’t think through the individual steps, it all falls under getting that thing done in your mind. But your child does not see you process these steps, they just see dinner on the table, or laundry in a basket without knowing what you did to get there.
Use sequencing words like first, next and last to explain that there is an order of operations to be followed to achieve the goal at the end. Try using short and simplistic sentences, even if it is more than a three-step process. Here are a few scenarios in which you may want to start practicing narrating events or reminiscing over a memory. When you child feels ready, encourage them to help you narrate by asking them what the steps are as you come to them.
Getting dressed/ready
Your child might demonstrate the beginning of this awareness just by knowing that bedtime routines take place in a certain order. In that example, you can even ask your child: “what do we do first? Then what do we do after?” This is the beginning of reinforcing the idea of an order of events.
Cooking
Children can be great kitchen helpers. Have the ‘help’ you by remembering the steps to a simple cooking process, if they are a little older you can have them help you by participating in parts of the cooking process. Even if they do not remember the steps, that is okay!
Ask your child the question, wait 3-5 seconds for an answer, remember their brains are trying to process your words! If you don’t get an answer, just keep moving on with your sequencing words and the step you are on. You can ask, “Hmm, what do you think comes next?”
Again, wait 3-5 seconds, perhaps with the prompting of the first step they will remember, but they may not. Again, that is okay! Just move forward with, “Well, I think the next step will be ___, what do you think?” Nod your head while you ask this last part, and most likely your child will mirror your movement and nod as well, which you can positively praise and continue the process.
Remember and reminisce
Take time to reminisce over a fun memory with your child. They may not remember the event happening, but they will see your face look happy as you talk about a happy memory. At first your child will simply watch you tell the story and see the look of happiness on your face and begin to associate talking about memories and stories with feeling safe and happy.
Later, they may take part in the story by adding details or taking turns with you to tell the story. Eventually, around age three, your child will be able to tell a whole, albeit short, story on their own. They might make up parts, or add new information to stories you already knew. They understand the basic requirements of a story and are able to use things they already know to make up new ones.
*This is, of course, a general guide and is not meant to diagnose. If you have concerns about your child’s behavior or development please be sure to speak with a medical professional, your child’s physician or teacher.
References
Gardner-Neblett, N., & Iruka, I. U. (2015). Oral narrative skills: Explaining the language-emergent literacy link by race/ethnicity and SES. Developmental Psychology, 51, 889-904. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039274
Hershkowitz, I., Lamb, M.E., Orbach, Y., Katz, C. and Horowitz, D. (2012), The Development of Communicative and Narrative Skills Among Preschoolers: Lessons From Forensic Interviews About Child Abuse. Child Development, 83: 611-622. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01704.x
Clancy, P. (1986). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Shirley Brice Heath. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. xii 421. Applied Psycholinguistics, 7(1), 85-90. doi:10.1017/S0142716400007219
Miller PJ, Sperry LL. Early talk about the past: the origins of conversational stories of personal experience. J Child Lang. 1988 Jun;15(2):293-315. doi: 10.1017/s0305000900012381. PMID: 3209645.
Engel, S. (2016). The Emergence of Storytelling during the First Three Years. Edited from the Zero to Three journal (Dec. 1996/Jan. 1997). Zero to Three. National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, nd Web, 2. Accessed 3/15/2021 from https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/1057-storytelling-in-the-first-three-years
Roth, F. P., Speece, D. L., Cooper, D. H., & Paz, S. D. L. (1996). Unresolved Mysteries: How do Metalinguistic and Narrative Skills Connect with early Reading? The Journal of Special Education, 30(3), 257–277. doi.org/10.1177/002246699603000303
Froma P. Roth, Deborah L. Speece & David H. Cooper (2002) A Longitudinal Analysis of the Connection Between Oral Language and Early Reading, The Journal of Educational Research, 95:5, 259-272, DOI: 10.1080/00220670209596600