Read the following passage and answer the questions.

There are many reasons to tell stories to children. Pragmatically speaking, story telling is all about language. When children listen and focus on a story told to them, they are developing listening, comprehension, and analytical skills. In terms of higher-level thinking, storytelling helps children recall details, summarize sequence, and visualize and describe the settings and scenes. They can speculate on what will happen next, and afterward, cite the clues that support their predictions. They can analyze the story structure, discuss plot elements, and evaluate, debate, and make their own judgements about why the characters behaved the way they did. They can compare and contrast other similar stories.

Finally, they can synthesize the experience in a creative way, perhaps acting out the story, writing an original tale using the same structure, or retelling the story from another character's point of view. All the strategies we use to analyze and evaluate other texts, both fiction and nonfiction, work just as well if not better, when a story is told.

Hearing stories also make a child want to read more of them. Storytelling helps turn kids into readers. But perhaps the best reason to tell stories is that it brings joy to the teller and listener alike.