Classroom Storytelling Techniques and Assessment with Rubrics

Posted on Apr 3, 2025 in Primary Education

Storytelling Corner

This is a place where you can read tales to children in the classroom.

Preparing Children for Storytelling

Activities to prepare children before telling a tale:

  1. Using Illustrations: Utilize pictures to help children understand and visualize the story. Many stories have illustrations that can introduce the narrative, elicit known vocabulary, introduce difficult words, and generally excite the child’s interest.
  2. Pre-teaching Vocabulary: Many stories are related to a specific topic. Introduce key vocabulary beforehand.
  3. Introduce the Theme: Before reading, ask learners questions about the story’s topic to engage them.
  4. Input Cultural Background: Many stories assume knowledge of cultural norms (e.g., the daily school routine). Provide necessary context.

Activities During Reading

Engaging children while reading the story:

  1. Use a Variety of Reading Methods: Employ different techniques, such as using a data projector, the teacher reading parts or the whole story aloud with the text visible, or reading texts accompanied by illustrations.
  2. Sustaining Listening: If a story is long, keep the class motivated. Pause at ‘cliff-hanger’ points and ask the class, “What happens next?”
  3. Total Physical Response (TPR): Incorporate actions related to the story.
  4. Characters and Voices: The teacher can read character dialogue using different voices to bring the story to life.

Post-Reading Activities

Activities to reinforce understanding after the story:

  1. Quick Comprehension Check: It’s always good practice to check understanding afterward. Ask children for responses, such as “Why is this person sad?” or “Which character did you like best?”
  2. Make a Poster / Illustrate the Story: Encourage creative responses through art.
  3. Role-Play / Acting Out: Interpreting stories through role-play can start with miming basic actions, then progress to speaking or improvising dialogue. The teacher will need to organize this in advance.

Understanding Assessment in Education

Assessment involves various processes: marking tests, recording grades, analyzing performance, evaluating results, measuring abilities, and estimating the student as a ‘whole’. Therefore, to assess means to evaluate, in general terms, how well previously planned objectives have been reached.

Using Rubrics for Effective Grading

Rubrics facilitate grading student performance, especially in areas that are complex, potentially inaccurate, or subjective. A rubric can be described as a list of specific and fundamental criteria that allow us to assess the learning, knowledge, or competence achieved by the student in a particular work or area. To this end, it establishes a quality rating for the different criteria against which an objective, competence, content, or any other task involved in the learning process can be evaluated.

It is generally designed so that the student can be assessed in an ‘objective’ and solid way. At the same time, it allows the teacher to clearly specify their expectations of the pupil and the criteria that will be used to assess a previously established objective, task, or type of activity.

This approach to assessment aims to give a more realistic value to traditional grades expressed with figures or letters.

Therefore, the rubric is useful for finding out how the child learns and can be considered a tool for formative assessment, especially when it becomes an essential part of the learning process. This is achieved when pupils become involved in assessing their own work (self-assessment), their peers’ work, or even when they recognize the important points to be assessed.