Encouraging Personal Narratives

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Evan’s family played a vital role in helping him interpret, label, and recall his new experiences with snow. Back in Arizona, Evan had many stories to tell his teacher and playmates at preschool. For the next several months, each time he spoke with his grandparents, he relived his snow-day tales. The stories, or personal narratives, that Evan told helped him make sense of this new experience, broadened his vocabulary, and reinforced his expressive language skills. Likewise, each time Evan told the story about how the snowball he threw at his sister knocked off the snowman’s nose and made his dad laugh, he deepened his memory of the event.

Children’s personal narratives are a window into their thinking. Their language also reveals how they use current knowledge to interpret new experiences. Evan’s first interpretation of a snowy field was to relate it to a recent incident with a broken sugar bowl. These verbal expressions of new mental constructions can be both fascinating and humorous. Likewise children’s personal narratives offer insight into their language development and overall intellectual, social, and emotional growth (Dodici, Draper, & Peterson, 2003).

Though children instinctively know how to put experiences, feelings, and ideas into story form, parents and caregivers can encourage their children’s language development by offering many storytelling opportunities and attentively listening while children share their accounts of events (Canizares, 1997). Though nothing can replace quiet and private time to listen to children, many working parents report that they use the time in the car, bus, or subway going to and from day care and/or errands to listen carefully to their children.

Children often share what they know or have learned in story form. This is because the human brain functions narratively—for most of us it is much easier to understand and remember concepts when we are given information in story form rather than as a collection of facts. Since the human brain retains information more efficiently in story form, parents can explain new information using stories. For example, when five-year-old Tiffany wanted to know how to tie her shoelaces, her daddy told her the following story:

Once upon a time, there were two silly snakes [the shoelaces] who decided to wrestle. They twisted around each other and tied themselves together very tightly [first tie]. The snakes became scared and tried to curl away from each other [the loops]. But the snakes tripped and fell over each other and tied themselves in a knot.