The use of Story-sacks & Benefits for learning

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  Defined by the National Literacy Trust campaign (2017) ‘Story sack’ is an encouraging activity that involves an easy material resource of a large cloth bag with a favourite children’s book, consisting other supporting materials. This fun, engaging activity (has an emphasis on the previous blog discussed regarding the increase of reading standards within the curricula,) can hint that extra boost of making reading meaningful and pleasant. Repeatedly, by now our society has acknowledged that having an interest in books and the drive to learn vocabularies can stimulate language development – expanding the advance of social and communicational skills.



  One of the benefits of ‘Story Sack’ are the involvement of parents/carers, building that 1:1 bond, making it stronger and memorable for the child. Barron and Powell (2003) points out the importance of parents’ involvement where they learn themselves to construct understanding about how literacy works, so that they have a clear understanding before continuing with the activity.

  As crucial as ‘Story Sack’ seems as an activity on it’s own, we can make it more interesting by introducing the multimodality aspects of this advocating task. Alongside this point, we are keeping ourselves up-to-date with modern practices of taking part in a story sack. Multimodality is an uncommon term to hear within everyday conversations and vocabularies, according to Bearne and Wolstencroft (2007) ‘multimodality’ involves the complex connection of word, image, gesture and movement, sound, including speech – likewise, these materials are associated with the use of puppets and other supporting materials within the sack. In support to multimodal literacy, modern practices as briefly mentioned above such as comic books, scripts etc. helps role play, acquiring you to change your own voice, gestures and movements depending on your characters from that particularly book. In conjunction with p4C in the ‘Priority of Primary Education’ blog, bringing stories to life is more likely to support you quicker in terms of understanding deeper meanings and exploring meanings in different ways, including working as a group or trying your own ideas.

  Some people may question the approach of story-sacks of ‘Why is it relevant now?’ – which, I thought that it was a very good question to discuss as it still benefits our modern generation of children. As said by Domingo, Jewett and Kress (2014) image and actions are taking the place of writing – this is where people can argue with the ‘power of reading’ and whether it’s necessary important to hit the national’s reading standard for each Key Stages. Regarding this, screens of the contemporary landscape are rapidly displacing the media of the printed page: reiterating others’ arguments of ‘why do we need books if technology is the new innovation?’

Reference:
  • ·      Bearne, E., and Wolstencroft, H. (2007) Visual Approaches to Teaching Writing Multimodal Literacy 5-11. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
  • ·      Domingo, M., Jewitt, C. and Kress, G. (in press, 2014) 'Multimodal social semiotics: Writing in online contexts' in K. Pahl and Rowsel (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Literary Studies. London: Routledge.
  • I, Barron & J, Powell. (2003) Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, 5.3. Institute of Education, M20 2RR. UK
  • ·      National Literacy Trust: How to make and use a story sack - https://literacytrust.org.uk/resources/how-make-and-use-story-sack/

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