How to Tell a Great Bedtime Story

When telling a story, use pitch, pacing, and pausing to keep your child hanging on your every word.

• Pauses create suspense and curiosity. You can use strategic pauses to let your child think of what will happen next, and then let the story take an unexpected turn.
• Voice is so important. In a story, you can vary the rhythm, pitch, intonation, you can speedup your words, or you can slow... down... your... words. You can move your voice up or down.

The advantage of telling over reading is that you don't have to hold and look at a physical book. You can use your face and hands to gesture and make eye contact.

Use your hands to show if something is huge or tiny, tap on nearby objects to imitate knocking on a door. The physical movements involve your children in the story.

A story can be changed around. If your kid wants to change the character, you can do that. A voyage through the seas can become a journey to Mars. You can change the sequence, the characters, or the phrases. This nurtures ideas we want our children to develop.

You can encourage children to be involved in the telling, so they are not just listening. Leave out parts of the sentence and let your child fill in the blank.

The idea is to use props or live musical accompaniment and let your child join in on the action.

Find an instrument, and as you tell the story, your child scores it. Or you can let your child take the lead - if they speed up, you speed up the action. You can also let everyone take a turn advancing the story.