Tell me a story by Heather Ledeboer
By Heather Ledeboer | Category: The Journey of Motherhood
My son really loves stories. As a former elementary school teacher, I love children’s literature and have thus acquired quite a collection of children’s books from my childhood, yard sales and my previous teaching days. As such, reading to Hunter has been part of our daily routine since he was just a baby. However, verbal stories are fairly new to us. The first time I remember "telling" Hunter a story was during a flight that we (the kids and I) took from California to Idaho last year. We had exhausted our book choices and so we turned to telling stories to pass the time. I randomly chose some characters for our story (Hunter, a dog and a dragon named Lollipop) and made up adventures for them for the remainder of our flight.
When we returned to California several days later, Hunter asked my husband to tell him a story with a dog, a dragon named Lollipop and himself as the characters. My husband proceeded to tell him a story and along the way named the "dog" Browning (my husband loves to hunt and thinks this would be a great name for a hunting dog). Fast forward a year later and perhaps you can venture to guess who the main characters are for almost EVERY story requested by our son (Hunter, Browning and Lollipop).
There are a few things to note here. The first is that if you have not already told your "first" story, I highly suggest you give some thought to the names (I mean come on, Lollipop?? I could have done better than that) and characters you chose as they may QUICKLY become lifelong friends. Second, and more important, is how deep of an impact stories can have on our children (and all forms of entertainment really, but we will leave that for another post). Just recently I have discovered that if I tell my son a story about "another child" who made poor choices to illustrate a point about why I don’t want him to do something, Hunter will ask me to repeat the story at least 3-5 times. He seems fascinated to hear the plight of another child and how their poor choices led them to a less than desirable result.
So what is my point in all of this? Really it is just to challenge you to consider the use of story telling as a means of further developing your bond with your child and also as perhaps a creative new tool for illustrating a point or lesson you want them to learn when perhaps old fashioned "explaining" does not seem to be doing the trick. Let me know what you think . . . I would love to hear how you use story telling in your home so that I can get some new ideas and learn from your experiences as well.
(P.S. The photo shown above is of my son and I three years ago on his first birthday reading one of his new birthday presents together–Thanks Sarah P., he still enjoys that book!)
I too would suggest picking characters carefully. My father told me and my brother stories all our childhood. He doesn’t know it but we were scared of the woods because we thought “three toes” was lurking in them. Three toes was a bear (my father thought it was snuggly but we thought it was horrible). I promised myself I would choose my characters more carefully when telling my children stories and name them better too!
Thanks for touching on this subject. It gave me a laugh to remember this.
[Reply]
Thanks Christina for your comments. I can see how a “three toes” bear might cause some concern:).
[Reply]