Who invented learning stories

Why Words Alive Matters. Pandemic Pivot. Our Impact. How Books Connect Us. Board of Directors. In the News. Reading Resources. Teens: Treat Yo' Shelf. Creating Life-Long Learners. Read Aloud Program. Family Literacy. Teen Services. Novel Ideas: Student Gallery. Contact Us. Become A Volunteer. Story grids are great for recalling and classifying vocabulary into word groups e. Once inputted into the grid the options are varied: you can ask students to swap grids for an extra challenge, create stories in groups or set the story writing for homework after eliciting possibilities and combinations in class.

The online world makes story generation easy. Choose from picture-based options and read or act out the final text together. Great for a further comic strip activity or use it as pure creative imagination time. Online websites such as Story Bird make creating beautiful and professional storybooks with your class easy.

The artwork can be used as stimulus or as an accompaniment to your own story. Hugely motivating. Hit enter to search or ESC to close. Offer insights into different traditions and values.

Offer insights into universal life experiences. Help children consider new ideas. Reveal differences and commonalties of cultures around the world. Promote a feeling of well-being, fun and relaxation. Encourage active participation. Increase verbal proficiency. By sharing stories with families that contain links to frameworks and interpretation of learning, learning stories allow teachers to include children and parents in the learning process.

This is especially powerful when the sharing is in real-time via a digital platform. Recording events in a narrative form allows children to see what they are learning from another perspective. Some examples in Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in Early Education by Margaret Carr tell of young children that are enthusiastic to show their portfolios to their families — even when the children themselves are not fond of reading.

This instills a love for learning that grows with their portfolios. It allows them to recognize their achievements. This, in turn, allows them to achieve success in their educational endeavors.

The anecdotal, private observation approach more often than not is deficit-oriented. And without the lens of learning growth, any old anecdote will do. Story-worthy events — moments of learning growth or success — come in many different forms, but many will be missed if the teacher is not paying attention.

And if a teacher is paying closer attention to a child true learning trajectory, only good things can happen.. Even for young children, there is value in making learners accountable. It gives them a sense of control over their education. If they feel that their actions are meaningful, they are more likely to engage in their learning. Writing learning stories helps with this sense of control, as it allows children to see how their actions are affecting the world around them. This is one of the main reasons learning stories replaced checklists in New Zealand.

Checklists tend to be deficit-oriented and children are aware of being looked at with a deficit-seeking mindset. Being seen as a collection of needs-to-do-betters is not how you build confidence and character in a child.

By comparison, knowing you are the hero in a sequence of learning stories that articulate success and points in time when you made a difference is a very different biography to prepare you for school life.

There is traditionally a lot of pressure on teachers to be objective, and checklists are objective. This not only makes these stories easy to write for teachers, it makes for compelling reading — for parents and the child. This sharing, interpretation, construction and re-interpretation process helps educators better understand the child, providing reflections and assessment that can be fed back into the teaching and learning process.

For a more in-depth analysis of the benefits of learning stories, we definitely recommend giving this book a read:. Learning stories are added to a child portfolio — often online and printed out. Educa makes this particularly helpful by being able to show links to framework goals and plans met along the way. Often for years. Educa has learning story templates and easy linking to plans and framework to make what was being done on paper easier — to create, to link and to share instantly with families.