Early Years children taking part in the BISB Creative Writing competition

The Early Years children have been ambitious by creating stories for the BISB Creative Writing Competition.

Within the Early Years Centre, we use an approach called ‘Story Telling and Story Acting’ (also known as ‘Helicopter Stories’). This approach allows for children’s imaginations to thrive. Through having their stories scribed by an adult, they learn about how their spoken words become written print and they have a meaningful context to apply their developing phonic knowledge. Over time and with gentle encouragement, the children begin to gain confidence and take over the marker to write words and sentences for themselves. Acting the stories out motivates the children to have a turn and builds a sense of community within class groups. The children practise counting skills through organising their acting cast. They illustrate their stories using different mediums which encourages the development of fine motor skills. They take their stories into their play, encouraging more creativity in play, including prop making and costume making. The learning within each story has the potential to cross all areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum:

• Expressive Arts and Design
• Communication and Language Development
• Physical Development
• Literacy Development
• Understanding the World
• Personal, Social and Emotional Development
• Mathematical Development

The ‘Story Telling and Story Acting’ approach was pioneered by Vivian Gussin Paley. It has since been further developed by Make Believe Arts in the United Kingdom and the approach fits well within a creative child led learning environment such as the Early Years Centre at BISB. Some of the benefits identified by research into the approach include increased language development for children, including EAL learners, development of oral story telling skills, increased confidence, social and emotional benefits, higher levels of creativity, and motivation towards other literacy based activities. To find out more about this approach, you can visit the Make Believe Arts website.