Storytelling and Family Literacy via NCTE

Storytelling and Family Literacy

NCTE: 1.29.2020 by Aspen Mock

Oral tradition and storytelling were just a normal part of spending my summers at my grandparents’ home. My grandfather Mac, with a sparkle in his eyes and his quick smile, was the quintessential Irishman—a weaver of original stories and tales, some true and some new. When we’d dialogue with him, my grandparents’ little kitchen, shrouded with the regularity of everyday life, turned into a colorful world filled with dramatic tales of love, mischief, and bravery.

Having a family culture that embraced storytelling developed and shaped me as a person and informed my education. Whenever a project at school had a narrative component, I had not only a great repository of family tales to share, but a home support system of people interested in and proud of what I had shared with my school community.

As educators, we can collaborate with our students and their families to create a story canon by creating, capturing, and preserving their own original stories, both fiction and nonfiction. Supporting and cultivating family literacy is the cornerstone of our shared school-home culture. Storytelling both reflects and shapes the culture in which it exists. Schools that can form literacy-based partnerships with families in their community strengthen and enrich their own cultural capacity and ability to serve their student population.

Here are some ways we can nurture family literacy, whether at home or at school:

Supporting Storytelling: Tips for Educators

➧ Guide students to choose a form of storytelling and a medium through which it will be preserved and shared.

➧ Create partnerships with families and various organizations to support and celebrate family literacy.

➧ Use best-practice techniques to develop and celebrate the narratives.

➧ Brainstorm about and give a mouthpiece to the untold stories in your region.

➧ Provide tutorials on how to use educational technology to capture and preserve family tales. Consider websites and apps (two examples are Storybird.com and BookCreator.com) that can help students and families create books out of their family literacy experiences.

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Automatic Readability Checker

Based on (7) readability formulas:

Grade Level: 13

Reading Level: difficult to read.

Reader's Age: 18-19 yrs. Old

(college level entry)