1. Storytelling is a great way for children to learn lessons, ways to navigate through social norms of the world and most important reading, comprehension and language. They identify key images and important moments by keeping it simple and the endings have an important point to take away, or an answer to a real problem. Both of these stories contained these points and are very well presented so that children can make real life connections, giving an even stronger understanding of the world around them. These two stories are not only educational but entertaining as well. By having stories entertaining it keeps the child or children focused on the story.  

2. While watching the Russian story The Four Friends the first time I was reminded of one of Aesop’s fables, The Lion and the Mouse. In the Russian story the mouse was the one animal that was able to rescue other animals from hunters. In The Four Friends, however there was a stronger moral of friendship and how all the animals worked together to help each other. The crow tells the story of how the mouse rescued a group of doves and after that the deer gets caught. When the deer does not return to meet with his friends the crow goes looking for him and finds him in a net. The crow carries the mouse back to chew through the net and while this is happening the tortoise gets caught. The deer then pretends to be dead so the hunter goes to him. The mouse has rescued the tortoise and then the deer runs off. The hunter gets so scared that he then runs away.

In The Lion and the Mouse, the mouse was also able to rescue the lion after being captured by hunters. I felt that the Russian story, however gave a stronger moral to the meaning of friendship and “don’t underestimate the strength of the little people”. 

3. Bedtime stories are a great way for children to prepare not only for school but other environments as well. It will also prepare them for participation in a literacy setting. “A bedtime story is a major literacy event which helps set patterns of behavior that recur repeatedly through the life of mainstream children and adults”. There are seven ways that a child learns from having been read to. It teaches children to give attention to books, acknowledges questions about books, and teaches them to respond to conversational allusions of the content of the books. Children also learn to use their knowledge of what books do to legitimate their departures from truth, they learn to accept book and book related activities as entertainment, and preschoolers learn to announce their own factual and fictive narratives. By the time children are usually three years old they have also learned to listen and wit as an audience. One of the first ways is that a child learns how to interact which is very important for school. When a child is being read to, very frequently the reader will ask the typical “wh” questions and the child will answer which fosters “alternate turns in dialogue”, and “ is socialized into the initiation-reply-evaluation sequences which is the structural feature of a classroom”. Storytelling also fosters labeling of objects which will teach the child how to resolve conflict between two dimensional and three dimensional objects. But one of the most important elements that storytelling will teach is “reading for comprehension. Without being able to understand what is being read can impact a child and their learning not just in school, but for the rest of their life.