Understanding Stories as Multimodal Experiences in Young Children’s Development

Abstract

Historically and culturally, stories are multimodal events that engage and instruct young children through image, movement, and sound. Whether children are gathered around campfires or computers, stories have the power to captivate, influence, and inspire young learners throughout early development. Not only do children read, listen to, and view stories, they also create stories through various modes and textual forms. Parents and families can support children’s development by understanding and utilizing multiple modalities to engage children through stories. Multimodal perspectives of story can promote cognitive, social-emotional, physical, and communicative development. In this chapter, I examine how stories function as multimodal experiences across developmental domains and explore how parents and families intentionally and creatively employ multimodal processes to encourage and support this development across traditional and digital textual forms.