Children, Youth, and Families

The International Storytelling Center provides the experiences, knowledge, and tools to help educators–and the parents of the children they teach–use storytelling to enrich the lives of our children and, in partnership with children's parents, help build family cohesiveness.

Any effective classroom teacher will tell you that one of the best ways to enhance the learning process is to tell relevant stories. Yet, few teachers today use storytelling as an integral facet of their teaching approach, and there are no major curricula explicitly designed with this in mind.

Telling and listening to stories stimulates children's language development, promotes creativity, strengthens their capacity for objective and rational thinking, teaches concentration, and enhances interpersonal skills.

Storytelling brings people together, provides positive role models, creates a sense of deep connection from one generation to the next, shows children how to empathize with others who have different values and experiences, exercises imagination, and stretches everyone's capacity to feel a full range of emotions.

Indeed, there is serious evidence that suggests the use of storytelling is a powerful tool for enhancing the learning of today's children.

A Success Story...

When Michigan educator and storyteller Sheila Dailey Carroll entered the fourth grade classroom, it took only a moment for her to identify the problem child. Darren was the boisterous one, endlessly acting up, always at the edge of being out of control. He was entering the fourth grade, but perhaps at the root of his disturbing behavior was that he read at a first-grade level.

"He got plenty of attention and all of it was negative," Carroll remembers. "The teachers expected him to be a dropout by the seventh grade."

Things turned completely around, however, when Darren participated in his first story project. Each of the students chose a picture book whose story they liked and set about learning the story's essential events. With tongue depressors made up as characters, each student told his selected tale.

To everyone's amazement, Darren was a hit as a storyteller. With the keen listening ability that many nonreaders have developed as a means of compensation, he was able to use language that captured the attention of his fellow classmates.

"Not only did he learn very quickly," Carroll recalls, "but when he saw that the class responded positively to him, he was motivated to read more. He was so successful as a storyteller that other kids began talking about his performance, and soon he was being invited to other classes to tell his story. And he began reading even more to increase his repertoire.

The results were dazzling. By the end of that same year, Darren tested at the fourth grade reading level—three full levels above where he scored less than a year earlier.