Get Children More Engaged in Story Time

This wonderful Jungle Setup, could be a perfect solution to get every child's attention and engagement during story time. Creating a provocation that can mimic the setting in the story, will enrich children's imagination and help them interpret the story better, while having lots of fun!

Here's what we used:

• Jumbo Animals
• Tree Blocks and natural tree barks from outside
• Down in the Jungle Big Book (you can use any book)
• Habutae Fabric to represent greens/grass/water
• Plants (can be sourced from outside)
• Natural fibres & fabrics such as Jute / Hessian (can be bought at any craft/fabric store)
• A table (you can set this up on the ground too)
• This provocation can be played inside or outside

Here's some tips to get children more engaged and why it is important: 

• As you tell the story, stop briefly to ask, ‘What do you think will happen next?’ or 'Which animal did this/that?' and have them point out the animal in the provocation. This helps to develop your children’s prediction skills and they're learning to listen and observe. 
• Encourage your children to participate in the telling of the story by playing with the animals and to mimic their behaviour in the setup.
• Using play animals can help children make connections between the characters in the story.
• Playing out the story is helpful for children to relate to the characters and develop their own characteristics. 
• Children can also learn to develop empathy by putting themselves in a character’s situation.
• This also gives children the opportunity to interpret the story in their own way and encourage imaginative, creative and strategic thinking. 
• Using real life resources in a creative setup will make their pretending feel more real.
• Children can also be encouraged to improvise and make new twists and turns: like, ‘What if the elephant suddenly jumped out of the bushes and scared the gorilla!'
• To add more excitement and creativity, children can be motivated to hunt for natural treasures outside like rocks, pebbles, plants, flowers, bark, sticks etc. to add to the provocation.

Giving children the opportunity and platform to share their ideas, opinions and thoughts during storytelling, is an excellent way to promote character building, socialisation, interpretation and creativity.  We hope this gave you some ideas to encourage a love of reading in children, and to help keep them engaged, wanting more!