Supporting the Creation of Narratives in the Early Childhood Classroom

Amy Starble

5/28/2017 2:55 PM

When I used to teach preschool, children who did not have complex communication needs used to love to tell me long, silly stories. I was never quite sure whether the story was based in reality or was entirely made up. Often, a preschooler's sense of time concepts really added to the mystery because when a child said, "I went to visit my grandma yesterday" and I knew that their grandma lived in Florida and they were in fact in school the previous day the story became even more interesting! I realized that children with complex communication needs rarely get the opportunity to tell stories. So often, the focus on communication programming is on functional language, getting needs met. However, as I mentioned in my last post, playful use of language can be incredibly motivating and exciting for young children. Here is a protocol I created to encourage children to start telling stories. As with their peers I did not bound them by the confines of "truth", I just encouraged them to create unique, interesting, and often funny stories. The protocol was designed to allow even the most emergent AAC user to be able to tell a simple narrative. You'll notice the process uses co-construction between the teacher and child. The co-construction creates the opportunity for multiple teachable moments for all students in the class. As the simple narrative is created the story is written on the board for all students to see. 

Child: Character: Support the child to navigate to a page in their AAC system that will allow them to choose a person or animal that the child wants their story to be about (I will often present these two options using Partner Assisted Scanning). Once we are on the page of their choice I say, "Who would you like this story to be about": MOM

Adult: Be Verb: For the emergent communicator the adult will pick the "be" verb next: WAS

Child: Action: Support the child to navigate to a page that will allow them to choose an action word they would like to choose. Again, I may present options using Partner Assisted Scanning in order to make sure I get the kind of action word they may be looking for. Once we are on the page of their choice I say, "What should our character do?": JUMP

Adult: Tense Markers: For the emergent communicator the adult may choose "-ing" or "-ed": -ING

Adult: Little Word: For the emergent communicator the adult may choose words such as "in" or "at" and possibly "the" as appropriate: AT THE

Child: Setting: Support the child to navigate to a page that will allow them to choose a place that the story takes place. Again, this will take some forethought and possibly the integration of Partner Assisted Scanning (i.e. Where should the story be: "home place"..... "school place"): PLAYGROUND

Adult: Pronoun and Be Verb: Based on the story the adult will choose an appropriate pronoun: SHE WAS

Child: Emotion: Again, support the child to navigate to emotion options and encourage them to choose an emotion that character might of been feeling: SILLY

In this example, here is the full simple narrative: Mom was jumping at the playground. She was silly! This is an errorless narrative structure and the children are encouraged to be as silly as possible! Additionally, screen shots of the sentence on the AAC system can be printed out and put into the child's writing journal.

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