Last spring, I worked at North Charleston Creative Arts Elementary, teaching creative writing to students in the after school program. I normally work with grades 1 through 5, but at NCCA, I was also assigned to the kindergarteners and pre-k students. It was a challenge to find creative writing activities that they could grasp and still have fun with but one of their favorites was when I read a picture book to them, "Library Mouse", and we did an activity based on the story afterwards.
Shared storybook experiences are a good way to help pre-schoolers and kindergarteners develop their language knowledge in a number of aspects. Phonologically, storybooks help to develop phonemic awareness, as many books for children use rhymes and alliteration to tell the story. Semantically, it helps to expand their vocabulary as they might hear words not often used in their daily lives, but the pictures in the book help to define the meaning for them. On a syntactic level, hearing a storybook read aloud can help them to develop and use more advanced sentence structures. In the realm of morphemic development, being read to helps children learn distinctions between tenses. Many storybooks use clever wordplay and repetition to emphasize the different forms that verbs can take. Pragmatically, simply by hearing the story and knowing that words in the book are used to tell what is happening, they begin to learn that written language can be used to communicate in many contexts.
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