Stories motivate children to listen and learn, and help them to become aware of the sound and feel of English, and to understand language points, while enjoyiong the story. This resource book has a selection of ready-to-tell stories, although the activities can be used with any story.

Children love family storytelling and parents can learn this practical, magical art. Here are methods, tips and resources to enable you to: create a listening space, use the day's events and rhythms to make stories, transform old stories and make up new ones, bring your personal and family stories to life, learn stories by heart using pictures, inner theatre, walk-about, singing the story and other methods, and find the tale you want from Nancy's rich story-cupboard.

The stories which are given in the following pages are for the most part those which I have found to be best liked by the children to whom I have told these and others. I have tried to reproduce the form in whihc I actually tell them--although that invariably varies with every repetition--feeling that it would be of greater value to another story-teller than a more closely literary form. My hope is that this book may be of use to those who have much to do with children. -- Preface.

This second edition is fully updated and addresses ways in which we can apply stories and storytelling with children who are troubled. Stories can empower children to take action and ask for help, including help with changes and life-plans. Stories provide a secure structure with endings and closure. The book develops the following topics: Stories for assessment Stories for understanding emotions Stories for exploring the senses Stories for managing loss Stories for ritual and drama There are new and revised stories, in particular addressing trauma and abuse. This book is written for all those people with the welfare of children as their priority.

What you hold in your hands is not a collection of stories. It is a simple, yet revolutionary method to create your own.

What is really going on when a child tells or writes a story? Engel's insights into this provocative question are drawn from the latest research findings and dozens of actual children's tales - compelling, funny, sometimes disturbing stories often of unexpected richness and beauty.

Storytelling in Early Childhood is a captivating book which explores the multiple dimensions of storytelling and story acting and shows how they enrich language and literacy learning in the early years. Foregrounding the power of children’s own stories in the early and primary years, it provides evidence that storytelling and story acting, a pedagogic approach first developed by Vivian Gussin Paley, affords rich opportunities to foster learning within a play-based and language-rich curriculum. The book explores a number of themes and topics, including: the role of imaginary play and its dynamic relationship to narrative; how socially situated symbolic actions enrich the emotional, cognitive and social development of children; how the interrelated practices of storytelling and dramatisation enhance language and literacy learning, and contribute to an inclusive classroom culture; the challenges practitioners face in aligning their understanding of child literacy and learning with a narrow, mandated curriculum which focuses on measurable outcomes. Driven by an international approach and based on new empirical studies, this volume further advances the field, offering new theoretical and practical analyses of storytelling and story acting from complementary disciplinary perspectives. This book is a potent and engaging read for anyone intrigued by Paley’s storytelling and story acting curriculum, as well as those practitioners and students with a vested interest in early years literacy and language learning. With contributions from Vivian Gussin Paley, Patricia ‘Patsy‘ Cooper, Dorothy Faulkner, Natalia Kucirkova, Gillian Dowley McNamee and Ageliki Nicolopoulou.