Children of the Cloth

Flannelboards are a great tool to help kids learn early literacy skills

By Renea Arnold and Nell Colburn -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2004

Flannelboards have been a storytime staple for years in both school and public libraries. We think the flannelboard, or feltboard as it often is called, is a great tool to help children build early literacy skills.

Reading research tells us that reading aloud is most effective when it is an interactive experience between the reader and the child. Flannelboard storytelling invites participation as young listeners try to guess what will appear from behind the board or call out the name of the animal, letter, or object being put on the board.

Beginning readers must understand how stories work: that stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that one event follows another in a sequence. Reading and literacy specialists call these "narrative skills." These help children understand what they are learning to read. Flannelboard storytelling emphasizes sequencing, as pieces of the story are put up one by one in a prescribed order. The importance of sequencing becomes apparent to children as they hold individual felt pieces and listen carefully for the appropriate cue that tells them it's time for their piece to go on the board.

This technique works especially well in the retelling of a story—the storyteller tells the story by herself the first time, and then retells it with the children's help. Retelling reinforces many skills—new vocabulary is heard again, new concepts are reemphasized, the sequencing is stressed again, and young children build their confidence as they anticipate the events of the story.

At our library we offer a simple flannelboard workshop that is popular with the early care and education community. A local pizza restaurant provides clean pizza boxes, which participants make into portable flannelboards. The sides of the box are taped together, the front of the box is covered with felt, and a simple dowel is provided to prop up the front of the box during storytelling. Felt story pieces and the dowel may be stored inside the box. This is a technique we learned from early childhood specialists Liz and Dick Wilmes in their useful book 2's Experience: Felt Board Fun (Building Blocks, 1994).

Veteran storyteller Judy Sierra also has some suggestions for making simple, inexpensive flannelboards. In The Flannel Board Storytelling Book (H. W. Wilson, 1997), Sierra suggests making a flannelboard from an artist's portfolio or a manila folder. The portfolios work well for outreach librarians. The manila folders are great for children interested in making their own flannelboards.

Both the Wilmes and Sierra books provide full-size patterns and texts for many delightful stories appropriate for flannelboard storytelling. We also like Ann D. Carlson's Flannelboard Stories for Infants and Toddlers (American Library Association, 1999) and Sierra's Multicultural Folktales for the Feltboard and Reader's Theater (Oryx Press, 1996), which features 20 folktales from around the world.

Many children's picture books make wonderful flannelboard stories. In our workshops we often have participants make figures from Charles G. Shaw's It Looked Like Spilt Milk (Harper, 1947). This is a perfect flannelboard story for beginners. Not only is the repetitive text easy to remember, the figures are just the right size for the flannelboard and they are all one color.

We also love the old Russian story about the gigantic turnip. There are many retellings of this tale; our favorite is The Gigantic Turnip (Barefoot Books, 1999) by Aleksey Tolstoy, in which an old man and woman need the help of their cow, pig, three black cats, four speckled hens, five white geese, six yellow canaries, and one tiny mouse to pull up the huge turnip in their garden. This story has 23 characters, but can be expanded easily to allow every young listener to have a felt piece to put on the flannelboard. The tale's predictable pattern supports children's understanding of story structure and development.

If you haven't tried flannelboard storytelling—do! You'll undoubtedly find many more creative ways to support early literacy skills, and you'll make your storytimes interactive and fun—the two most important ingredients in early learning.