Can Storytelling Help Your Child With Math?

It’s obvious that storytelling can help children develop better reading and verbal skills, and, if they tell stories themselves, self confidence. But better math skills? Who knew?

Well for one, Daniela O’Neill and her colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. They found that preschoolers who can tell fairly sophisticated stories (from multiple perspectives) do better in math two years later than those who don’t have robust storytelling skills.

One of the tests that O’Neill’s team performed involved showing children a wordless picture book of a frog hopping around a restaurant and then asking them to tell the story to a puppet who had never seen the book. The kids who talked about the reactions of secondary characters, like the waiter, as well as the frog later outperformed kids who told the story as if the frog was the only character.

Interestingly, the researchers also tested the same preschoolers’ verbal abilities. Kid’s who had better vocabularies and spoke in longer sentences demonstrated no advantage in math later on.

O’Neill reasons that the type of skills it takes to switch perspectives in a story or to keep track of relationships are the same types of mental agility that are necessary for mathematics.

The moral of this little story? The more that your little ones are exposed to storytelling the better. So next time you spin a yarn to your preschooler, ask her a few open-ended questions about the plot or characters. Or better yet, have your kid tell you a story and encourage her to elaborate and incorporate multiple perspectives. The more practice the better!

For more information on O’Neill’s study, check out: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071110/mathtrek.asp. And for some fun math stories for children grades three to six, check out Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School, by Louis Sachar and other books in the popular Wayside School series.