Telling stories

Speech and language therapy

﻿Hello, everyone. My name's Emma. And welcome to today's lesson. I'm looking forward to today's session and I hope you are too. I can't wait to get started. But before we do, just a quick reminder. We here at Oak are here to support any approaches you might already be using and any work you might have already been set. We know this lesson is going out to so many different children and families. So if you're not sure or have any questions, please do contact your child's school or use your speech and language therapy team. In today's session, we're going to be focusing on using language to begin to tell stories. We're going to think about how you can help to plan stories using structure and visuals. And we're also going to think about some interesting and fun ways that you can use language to tell stories at home. Throughout all the activities, I'm going to be sharing some tips for adults so that they can help you to develop your use of language at home. So for today's session, you'll need some pictures, a favourite book, a pen and some paper. Adults, you'll need some writing equipment and the downloadable resource that's available on the Oak website with this lesson. So before we begin, find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed for the lesson. Turn off any distractions or notifications that you might have running on your device and make sure that you and your adult are seated comfortably. When you're ready, let's begin. Okay, let's start by doing some talking and thinking about telling stories. Telling stories is a really important part of life. It not only helps us with learning but it's important for sharing information. Sharing information about ourselves and our experiences helps us to make and maintain relationships with other people. When we're working on developing our language for storytelling, we begin by learning to talk about our play. We then learn to remember events within our own experiences and use our language to talk about them and then we learn to tell stories based on sequences of pictures. So let's have a go at using some pictures to tell some stories. Gather up some pictures of you doing an activity. You may need to take some of these pictures now and that's okay. So you could plan an activity, go away and take your pictures of you completing this activity and then come back and complete the rest of the lesson. But you'll need about six pictures for your activity to complete this task. When you've got your pictures, arrange these into the correct order by using your memory. Then see if you can retell the event, write notes for each of your pictures to help retell that story. Adults, there are lots of ways that we can work this type of activity into the child's every day. We can gather up as many pictures of the child as possible, completing day-to-day activities or events so that they are then able to sequence and tell the story about these activities. Once the child is confident in sequencing and providing a bit of narrative about their activities, then we can increase the amount of time between the events and the time that we're asking them to sequence and retell. So when we're first working on this, we want to make sure that we're sequencing and narrating as soon as possible after the activity but over time, we can increase the amount of time between when sequencing and narrative tasks take place. We can also work on reducing the number of pictures, so asking the child to include more information from their memory and recall, rather than what's in the pictures. So once we're confident in sequencing and retelling a story based on pictures of ourselves, we can then work to developing our language for telling more stories. The next stage of development is that children learn to retell the stories they're familiar with hearing. This then gives them the skills to be able to create their own more original stories, using language and time. So it's time to find a book now. You and your adult need to read it together and do a little bit of talking about who is in the story, where it happened, what happened and when it happened. You could maybe draw out some pictures of the key parts of the story. Use these pictures to try and help you to retell the story in as much detail as possible. So when you've completed this activity, come back to the video and press play to continue. We can bring stories to life by using strategies like sensory stories and role play to really help the child to understand the words being used and the sequences of the events within it. We can also use visual strategies to help a child plan and write their own stories. For example, this narrative planner here would be a really nice way to help a child think about who, where and what's going to happen in their story and then plan the beginning, middle and end. And this would really help them to be able to form a detailed narrative by thinking about it and spending some time planning it first. So now it's time to have a go using the story planner to make your own story. Adults, help the children to create a story with lots of interesting and imaginative ideas. Maybe you could try drawing out some pictures of the key parts of your story to bring it to life. You could use these pictures to tell your story in as much detail as possible. Once you've finished this activity, come back to the video and press play to finish the lesson. Well, that brings us to the end of today's lesson but a really big well done on the storytelling that you've been working on today. If you'd like, you could ask your parent or carer to send a copy of the stories that you've been sequencing and telling with your teacher at school so that they can see the fantastic progress that you've been making using language. You could also ask your parent or carer to share this with @OakNational on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram so I can see the progress that you're making too. Well, all that's left for me to say is thank you but take care and enjoy the rest of your learning today. Bye bye.

Telling stories

Telling stories

These resources will be removed by the end of the Spring Term 2026.

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