3. Creating your story glove (age range: 5+)

1. Aims

The activity here presented is aimed at:

• Supporting oral language development in the heritage language
  
• Managing bilingualism in an oral language interaction setting
  
• Stimulating dialogue between parents and children by focusing on the role of the parent to support their child’s language development
  
• Increasing the quantity and quality of parent child interaction to support child’s language development
  
• Bolstering child’s confidence in the heritage language.#

2. Reflection

We have created a virtual storytelling glove to support the narration building in telling stories with your child. We would like you to try this activity either at the group meeting or at home. Before you start the activity we would like you to reflect on some questions below. You can video or audio record yourself to share your experience with your group forum. 

Do you remember any particular stories that left a mark on your memory? 

Did you enjoy listening to or telling stories as a child, if so why? 

Do you think your children are interested in stories? 

What kind of a method do they follow when telling stories? (e.g. co-creating, reading from books, narrating stories from your recollection) 

What kind of stories do they tell? 

Please reflect on these questions and share your experiences with the group or with us via using the storytelling forum.

3. Procedure

Home activity

You can choose to watch or listen to the story sources we share below or you can simply tell a story from your recollection or about your family history.

Example of Pinocchio in Turkish

After listen or share your story with your child, you can prepare a glove from paper as in below:

Now try to retell the story with your child by looking at the topics in the glow by asking questions on the topics written on each finger. The fingers propose five topics to shape the narration of storytelling. These are: the setting, characters, the problem, events in the story and the solution. Using these five main narration topics you can help your child to retell the story:

• When your child narrates the story in the country language you can support them by translating their words into your heritage language (e.g. Turkish) and ask your child if they mean it
• You can ask your child to translate some of the words used in the story to the country language (e.g. English)
• You can support your child by filling in the blanks when they struggle to communicate

EXPERIENCES: 

• Did you enjoy this activity? How was your child’s participation?
  
• Which stories did you use for this activity?
  
• How was the use of languages? Did your child insist on using one language over the other?
  
• Were there moments of struggle for your child? If so, what might have caused it?
  
• General comments and experience sharing

4. Resources: suggested videos to watch

• How to retell a story for kids:
  

• How to retell a story instructional video:
  

• How to retell a story – Glove game: