Storytelling is one of the simplest things you can do with young children, and one of the most useful. It needs no screen and no worksheet, only a child, a listener and something to spark the first line. This page is for nursery practitioners, childminders, reception teachers and parents. It covers where storytelling sits in the Early Years Foundation Stage, the goals it supports, how adults help, and the approaches settings use most.

Storytelling in the EYFS framework

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is the statutory framework that nurseries, pre-schools, childminders and reception classes in England follow for children from birth to five. The current version for group and school-based settings is dated 13 July 2026 and took effect on 1 September 2026, and childminders have a version of their own, published alongside it. You can read both on gov.uk: the EYFS statutory framework. What follows is our plain-English reading of the version for group and school-based settings.

The framework has seven areas of learning. Three are prime areas, the foundations for learning and for making relationships: communication and language, physical development, and personal, social and emotional development. Four are specific areas, which build on the prime ones and make them stronger: literacy, mathematics, understanding the world, and expressive arts and design. Storytelling runs through most of them, but it does its most direct work in two: Communication and Language, and Literacy.

EYFS communication and language: where storytelling sits

The framework puts spoken language underneath everything else: it is the area all the others depend on. In its description of Communication and Language, storytelling is named directly, alongside conversation and role play, as one of the main ways children grow confident with a wide range of words and sentence shapes. The adult's part is to model, to help, and to ask the kind of gentle question that invites a child to say more.

It also describes how adults build language day to day: by talking about whatever has caught the child's interest, and repeating back what the child says with a new word added. That is a good description of a storytelling session. The child offers a line, the adult takes it up, gives it back with a new word in it, and asks what happens next.

Literacy in the EYFS: telling before writing

In Literacy, the framework treats reading as two things: understanding language, and reading the words on the page. Understanding begins in babyhood, and grows as grown-ups chat with children about everyday things and the books they share. Writing is two things too: spelling and handwriting on one side, and composition on the other, which the framework describes as forming ideas and putting them in order out loud before they are written down. Telling a story aloud, with a beginning, a middle and an end, is composition in speech: the part of writing that comes before the pencil.

EYFS early learning goals that storytelling supports

The early learning goals (ELGs) describe where children are expected to be as they finish the EYFS. For most children, their teacher looks at this as the reception year ends. The framework is clear that the goals are not a curriculum, and that practitioners with children younger than reception age don't need to use them. They are still a useful map of where storytelling leads. These are the goals where it plays a direct part, in our words.

• Listening, Attention and Understanding (Communication and Language). Listening closely while a story is read, and answering with questions, comments and actions; and keeping a conversation going, back and forth, with adults and other children.
• Speaking (Communication and Language). Explaining why something might happen, using new words picked up from stories, rhymes and books; and talking about their ideas and feelings in full sentences, about what happened, what is happening and what will happen, joined with words like "and", "because" and "so".
• Comprehension (Literacy). Retelling a story they have heard in their own words, using new vocabulary; guessing what comes next at the key moments; and using new words when talking about stories and in role play.
• Being Imaginative and Expressive (Expressive Arts and Design). Making up stories, changing them and telling them again, together with other children and adults.
• Creating with Materials (Expressive Arts and Design). Using props to play characters from stories, which is, in effect, a description of a story sack.

How adults support storytelling

None of what follows is a rule. It is what many practitioners and parents do, and it fits the framework's picture of an adult who models, helps, and asks questions that invite a child to say more.

• Ask open questions. "What happens next?", "Who lives there?", "How did she feel?" A question that can't be answered with yes or no leaves the story with the child.
• Retell together. Tell a familiar story many times, then let the child tell it back. Retelling in their own words is named in the Comprehension goal.
• Sequence it. Put the story in order with pictures, objects or a drawn map: first, then, next, at the end. Asking "what do you think will happen?" before turning the page practises anticipating key events.
• Bring in new words. Echo the child's line back with one new word added. "He went in the cave." "He crept into the dark, echoing cave."
• Let children tell their own. Retelling builds the shape of a story; inventing one is where children use it. Write their stories down as they tell them, and read them back.

Our storytelling guide goes further into story stones, story dice and story tiles, and how children use them to tell their own stories.

Story sacks, story stones, story spoons and story maps

Story sacks. A story sack is a cloth bag built around one story, usually a picture book. Inside are things that bring it to life: soft toys or small figures for the characters, objects from the story, and sometimes a related non-fiction book, a simple game or a rhyme card. The adult reads the book, then the children handle the props and retell it. Story sacks are often made by settings and lent to families, so the same story is told at nursery and at home.

Story stones. Smooth stones, each with one picture on it: a fox, a key, a house, a moon. A child picks a few and tells a story that links them. They are often kept in a basket and passed round a circle, each child adding a stone and a line.

Story spoons. Wooden spoons with a face drawn or painted on the bowl, one for each character, held up and moved like simple puppets. They are easy to make with children.

Story maps. A drawing of the story as a journey: the house at the start, the path through the wood, the bridge, home again. Children follow the map with a finger as they retell. Maps make sequence visible, and they are a natural partner for stories with a journey in them. Talk for Writing, an approach to teaching writing, builds on the same idea: children learn a story by heart with a drawn map of it and actions, then change it and make up their own.

Small world play

Small world play is play with miniature people, animals, buildings and landscapes: a farm, a dolls' house, a tray of sand with dinosaurs in it. The framework mentions small world play under Physical Development, for the fine motor control it builds. They are just as useful for language. When children move small figures around a scene, they narrate, and that narration is storytelling. Join in as a character, ask what happens now, and add a problem for the story to solve: the bridge is broken, the dragon is hungry, the rain is coming.

Helicopter Stories

Helicopter Stories is an approach based on the storytelling and story acting of the teacher and writer Vivian Gussin Paley, and developed in the UK by Trisha Lee and the charity MakeBelieve Arts. In outline, a child tells a story and an adult writes it down exactly as it is told, without correcting it. Later, the group sits round a stage marked out on the floor with tape, the adult reads the story aloud, and the children act it out. MakeBelieve Arts runs training in the approach, and Trisha Lee's books describe it in detail.

EYFS activities: storytelling ideas to try

• A story basket. Five or six objects in a basket. Each child takes one and adds it to the story.
• Retell with props. After a favourite book, put out three objects from it and ask a child to tell it back using them, in order.
• The wrong ending. Retell a familiar tale and get the ending wrong. Children are quick to put it right, and they have to know the sequence to do it.
• Walk the story. Lay out pictures or objects on the floor in order, and walk along them as the story goes. Outdoors, chalk the path.
• Story acting. Write down a child's short story in their words, then act it out together, in the spirit of Helicopter Stories.

Where The Story Path fits

The Story Path is our own storytelling game, and one tool among all of these. It is a set of solid oak story tiles, each 120 mm square, engraved with a picture of a place: a tower, a cave, a crossroads. Every tile has an arrow joint, so any tile joins any other, and the story lies on the floor as a path from a first page to one that reads The End. It works like a story map you build as you go, or a story sack you can lay out: the pieces come in a cotton drawstring bag, which is also the pile you draw from.

In a group, children pass the bag round the circle. Each draws a tile, joins it on and adds the next line, and the path keeps the whole story to retell at the end. Children can sequence it, walk back along it, and change the order and tell it again.

The starter set, no name is for nurseries and classrooms. Its first page reads "Once upon a time…", so any child can be the one the story is about.

There is also a free version of the game on our website. A child types their name, draws tiles from a bag on the screen, and their story is read back with their name in it.