I have just recently discovered this website which is filled with stories, both classic fairytales and tongue twisters. When you click on a story you can both read it and listen to it.
It is easy to navigate on the site. The stories are divided in;
Original stories
Fairytales
Classic
Educational
Junior
In these main categories you find sub categories where you find a number of stories, for example H C Andersen, The Brothers Grimm, Greek Myths and 1001 nights.
If you have younger children in your class you can choose to listen to a nursery rhyme or a story that the children are familiar with. You can also show pictures from a book while you listen to make it easier to follow the story. This bring me to a disadvantage in this site, there are no pictures to print out to help the children to understand the story. Of course you can draw your own or you can search for a book where you have pictures from the story.
If you have older children in your class you can ask them to write a comic strip about the story they have listened to or you can use it as a listening activity where you listen and then answer some questions. You can also let half of the class listen to a story and then ask them to
retell the story to someone who haven’t heard it.
To use this in your class you just need a computer with speakers. If you don’t have access to this you can print out the story and read it yourself. This can be a better way with young children although the story on the website is read in a slow rate.
So go to The Storynory to find out how you can use this website!
Frida Karlsson
The Blog Comment
ReplyDeleteThe Storynory. Free audio stories for kids.
I really liked this website. It is just like Frida says, filled with stories. The Storynory has given a free audio story every week since November 2005. I have nothing to disagree about her blog. The website works just in the way Frida describes it.
One problem with Storynory is to find a story that fits a child both in their knowledge of English and their age. A story written for children speaking English as a native language is often too difficult to understand for children in the same age but learning English as a second language. However Storynory can still be used in Swedish schools as one of the tools to learn students to talk, write and understand English. I think it´s a good idea if the teacher first gives the students a briefing of words that might be new and difficult before listening to the chosen story. It´s also possible to print and hand out the story. I don´t recommend that. My experience is that that many children then get stuck on some words and can´t concentrate on the plot. You don´t have to understand every word to understand the main stream. It´s better to let the students ask afterwards if there were any difficulties. Or hand out the text after listening once, talk about the plot and what´s happening, and then listen again.
It’s always the same voice reading the stories, she calls herself Natasha. She is very clear and articulate good. It’s a good idea to use the same voice. It makes you feel comfortable and it´s relaxing.
In her blog Frida gives some god advises how to use Storynory. I´m sure I´m going to use this ICT resource. You might see it as a problem that the sight has very few illustrations to their stories. Illustrations can explain and give a story or a fairytale a higher value. But it can also be an obstacle for your own imagination. Who hasn´t first read a book and then seen the movie and got very disappointed because you didn´t expect the characters to look like that eg. Your own imagination is something very valuable. A why not let you students do their own pictures and then talk about the picture and what’s happening on it.
/ Kristina Espes Voxberg
I am going to use this website!
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Ulrika Lindqvist
I also think this is a very nice website with a lot of stories, both wellknown and unknown stories. These stories you can use both with older and younger learners. It´s like Frida says, you can choose to listen to a nursery rhyme or a story that is familiar to the younger children. If you choose a wellknown story like Three little pigs you can first read the story in Swedish, so every one have heard it before, then pick out words from the story and translate and work with them before they listen to the story in English.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it´s a disadvantage, as Frida says, that you can´t print out pictures from the story to help the children to understand the story. But sometimes it can be an advantage that you can´t see any pictures, especially with unknown stories. The children don´t have any pictures in their mind and have to imagine and create their own pictures.
You can use these stories together with many different activities, both before and after listening to the story. Like Frida mentions you can use the stories as listening comprehension activities,the children can write comic strip about the story and answer to questions about the story. I also thinks that you can use many of the stories in a theme-based work in school. If you work with the Bible you can find some stories from the Bible at this website.
The children usually hear the teacher´s voice telling stories to them or the voice at the CD which belong to their textbook. I think it´s good to hear someone else tell something to them, to hear different voices.
/Eva Gustafsson