Playful and physical active storytelling in day care settings

This paper is about playful and physically active storytelling (PPAST) with children in day care. It is highlighting why this way of telling a story, combined with pedagogical tact for maintaining play mood during the story, can support 2–5-year-old children´s imaginary play. From 2016 to 2020 three prototypes of physical active stories for kindergartens and seven for nurseries and home-nurseries were designed to facilitate PPAST in day care. The stories were designed in a design-based research approach drawing on qualitative as well as quantitative data generation. The material was distributed to 3.000 day care facilities in Denmark. This paper aims at answering two questions: How does PPAST work for different groups of children? What makes PPAST playful? According to the participating pedagogues the children that benefit the most from PPAST are children in vulnerable positions. Seven principles of significance for play to emerge during or after PPAST can be deduced from the empirical data. PPAST must include children’s co-determination, children´s as well as the pedagogue’s embodiment of the story rituals, an imaginative open storyline that can be combined with aesthetic improvisations and the inclusion of affordances in the physical environment and finally, storytelling object(s) that inspire the story and remain when the storytelling ends are essential. And perhaps most importantly, the story must give room for children’s differentiated participation