By Small Talk Speech Pathology

Sunday 11 December 2011

Christmas Stories

Story telling is wonderfully enjoyable for children and has many benefits including:
- increased school readiness for reading and learning
- increased communication
- increased opportunity to teach concepts such as letters, shapes, counting and colours
- improved listening, memory and vocabulary skills
- increased opportunity to discuss social skills
- further development of imagination and creativity
- increased understanding of narrative structure eg. beginning, middle, end.


The festive season is a great time of the year to go through Christmas stories with children.  Children everywhere are often interested in the story of baby Jesus' birth especially during Christmas.  Here are all sorts of free printables that will help them understand the story in an enjoyable way.  We have also included other printable Christmas stories and blank templates for the kids to write their own story.

Activity Village has colouring pages,  the nativity story with captions and pictures, foldable booklets, felt board pieces and finger puppets.  There are even blank nativity story pages so that the children can retell the story in their own words - a wonderful narrative task to work on expressive language and literacy.





 Print here at Activity Village






 Print here for Christmas Stories & Poems
Print here for Christmas story lined paper

Here are some story telling tips to increase children's language skills:
- Focus on special Christmas vocabulary items such as Christmas, tree, Santa, reindeer, Jesus, Mary, sleigh, shepherds etc.
- Use describing words such as colours and sizes eg. red, green, white, large, small etc.
- Ask children to retell the story using their own words and the beginning/middle/end structure.  For a higher level task, you can get them to retell the story and to change one or more parts for some variation.

Happy Story Telling & a Merry Christmas to all!

V









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