Early literacy & numeracy—building confidence and writing skills through storytelling at SDN Surry Hills

Preschool educators at SDN Surry Hills have been using Helicopter Stories to support children’s early literacy, and are building confidence and connections along the way.

Rachel Kunze is a Senior Educator at SDN Surry Hills and is undertaking a teaching degree at the University of New England. After learning about Helicopter Stories, she introduced the activity to her class of preschoolers.

Helicopter Stories is a child-led approach to early literacy learning based on the work of teacher-researcher Vivian Gussin Paley. The Stories involve sitting with one child and writing down their story word for word. Following the child completely as they invent characters and create a story, the educator encourages them to “fill the page”, showing the page filling up as they scribe. The child’s classmates are then invited to act out the story together.

This simple act of attending to each child’s imagination develops their early literacy and helps them to have a voice.

Rachel says, “Doing this one-on-one with a child allows their imagination to be fully written out, not edited or changed by other children. Children who might not have the confidence to participate in group times or group storytelling can share their ideas this way. The acting-out part is really powerful. Children feel so proud when everyone wants to be part of their story.”

Creating Helicopter Stories develops children’s confidence and imagination, builds their vocabulary and makes powerful connections between the spoken and written word. The preschoolers have used finger puppets, sock puppets (from odd socks eagerly donated by families) and live-action performance to bring life to their stories. This in itself has great benefits as children develop working memory, practice taking turns, negotiating, leading and following. 

After a few months of storytelling, educators have adapted the experience and the children now make Helicopter Stories together.

Sitting in a circle, Rachel uses a big clipboard, paper and texta and invites the children to come up with characters and a setting. One by one, they go around the circle and add their line to the story. They have learned a good story has a “conflict” – a problem and then a solution – and soon the characters are lost in forest!

Some children are more confident than others in this group storytelling, but doing the individual work has built their skills and interest. Going around the circle also ensures everyone who wants a turn can be included. With some coaching, patience and negotiation, the stories have a happy ending. Plans are made to act out the story later in the day.

After each story is hand-written, it’s typed up for families to read at home-time. The children are invited to use paper and pencil to illustrate – drawing ideas like this is an important building block for writing letters and words later on.

Through these engaging experiences, the preschool children at SDN Surry Hills have found a passion for storytelling. Each day they eagerly make-up new stories and revisit old characters -  talking and listening, exploring parts of a story and learning how their words are represented on the page. Together, they are laying important building blocks in their early literacy development.