Fairy Tales are essential stories for childhood. These stories are more than just happily ever after, they portray real moral lessons thru characters and virtue shown in the stories. They do not only captivate the imagination of young minds, but also enhances their creativity and reasoning skills. A child learns a lot by simply listening to these amazing stories. It also creates a special parent-child bond, when parents read stories to their children.
Fairy tales may bring children to a fantasy land but as they grow, the moral truths of these stories remain in their hearts and minds.
Not all parents believe in the importance of fairy tales for kids. But studies show that fairy tales bring significant positive results in the development of a young mind.
Fairy Tales are also fun and can bring about many benefits to your children; here are a few of them:
1. Early Literacy Development
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” ― Albert Einstein
Storytelling plays an important role in Early Literacy development. It acts as an essential building block to literacy. Children’s imaginations are further enhanced through listening to fairy tales. You can engage children to discuss how the fantasy land or amazing worlds from these stories can be different or the same from our real world. Through such interaction with your children, it will help them express their ideas easily.
Studies also show that regular storytelling activities can help broaden a child’s vocabulary.
2. Positive Problem Solving Skills
Children learn from the characters in the stories and this helps them connect the situation with their own lives. The stories show children how to have a positive outlook amidst any anxieties, battles and problems in life. It also teaches them critical thinking skills.
3. Building Resilience in Children
The world today can be seen as frightening place. Many families and most specifically children can undergo tremendous stress. In such situation, children need to be aware that bad things happen to everyone. Fairy tales can help them develop emotional resiliency by helping them connect the stories to real life issues where most of the time the hero triumphs. These stories show them that we all go through life challenges and that they must always be prepared and believe that they can succeed in life.
4. Cultural Literacy
Reading Fairy tales to children or storytelling is not only a foundation to literacy development but also give emphasis to various cross cultural values and behaviors.
5. Fairy Tales teaches the Basic of a Story
Fairy Tales are great tools for teaching kids about story development, conflict resolution, the development of characters, heroes and villains and simply broadening their imagination. Furthermore, it helps them differentiate fiction to non-fiction stories.
Whilst often forgotten, story tales should be considered as timeless. As parents and teachers it is a good idea to research ways you can introduce this genre to children and allow them to enjoy the stories you, your parents, grandparents and so on, have maintained as part of the story telling tradition of our cultures.