Scaffolding Story Dictation
While many children volunteer stories they already have in mind, Carrie L. Lobman and coauthors noted in their May 2015 Young Children article that teachers can also“ find a story to be told”( 94) by building on their observations of children: A teacher might, for example, prompt a story related to a child’ s play experience or an interest expressed at circle time.
Once a child begins dictating their story, researchers and educators have varying opinions about how much the“ scribe” should intervene. Some teachers, like those studied by Nicolopoulou and colleagues( 2022), ask questions only to check whether a child wants to add to their story or has finished it. In contrast, Sally C. Hurwitz shares in her September 2001 Young Children article,“ The Teacher Who Would Be Vivian,” that Paley favored asking questions to clarify meaning. After listening to a story about a father who flew to the moon in search of his son“ who was magic”( had magical powers), Paley asked if the father was magic too. When the child said no, Paley said,“ The reason I asked is that he was able to go up to the moon to look for the boy.” This led the child to clarify his intent.
Like other Paley followers, we lean away from routinely prompting for story elements during dictation to avoid taking over a child’ s stories. However, we encourage teachers to foster children’ s knowledge about story structure and themes through other activities and to observe whether children gradually transfer that knowledge to their own storytelling. Past issues of Young Children offer many activities and strategies to support story comprehension and storytelling. These include creative spin-offs of Paley’ s approach, such as those explored through teacher research and teacher inquiry:
› Ron Grady wondered about and engaged children in story dictation based on photographs of their own play in“ The Play’ s the Story: Creating Play Story Booklets to Encourage Literacy Behaviors in a Preschool Classroom”( 2021).
› In“ The Power of Child-Created Texts and Puppetry: Nurturing Preschoolers’ Social and Emotional Development”( 2024), Kiyomi Umezawa and Emiko Kurosawa Arakaki inquired about and encouraged children to dictate stories about puppet characters, then use the puppets to act those stories out.
Observing Story Content and Form
Children’ s dictated stories can be a rich source of information about their interests as well as their understanding of what a story entails. Teachers might notice that children borrow content from their peers( McNamee et al. 1985; Faulkner 2017; Tariq 2024), perhaps to fit in( Cooper 2017) or to elicit the same positive reaction( such as laughter) that another child’ s story received( McNamee et al. 1985; Faulkner 2017). They also reuse content from storybooks and media( Tariq 2024). Thus, educators can expect story dictations to reveal children’ s individual concerns and interests as well as influences from peers and the broader culture. While the issue of potentially sensitive topics( intense violence, intimate details about family life, sexual content) was not raised in the Young Children articles we reviewed, Lee( 2016) and Cooper( 2017) provide ideas for how teachers might respond to these.
Story dictations also give teachers an opportunity to observe story structure, which tends to vary among young children due to differences in language and narrative skills as well as cultural variations in storytelling( Schick & Melzi 2010). For example, while some kindergartners in our study provided characters, settings( a place and / or time of events), and plots, other children recounted just one event, named or described characters but provided little action, or told stories that were disjointed. As Rothman( 2006) noted, some children’ s stories might be descriptive and even poetic( see“ Examples of Story Dictations” on page 66 for an illustration of this variety).
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