Mental health care has to start at early age because that means investment in mental health in adult age. As one way of strongly encouraging developmental needs of children we chose activity of storytelling. Storytelling enriches vocabulary, helps in designing concepts, encourages creativity. Storytelling contributes in development of social skills. Also it helps to make bonds between a child and adult, which means development of emotional stability. Storytelling opens all kinds of possibilities for development of stimulating activities which can be very interesting to children.
Storytelling as important activity for children s development, their mental health and social skills are promoted in kindergarten in Čakovec, Croatia. Kindergarten teachers were educated about psychological features of storytelling and they got the list of stories for reading to children. They keep diaries about storytelling and activities for children afterwards.
We used Pros/ag scale to see the impact of storytelling and these activities on social and emotional development of children. Scale was used at the beginning and the end of the school year during which storytelling and activities were implemented in every day work. 152 children were tested and results showed that prosocial behaviour increased, while aggressive behaviour did not change. Reason for this maybe lies in fact that stories are full of prosocial elements, while aggressive behaviour and how to manage it, is usually not the theme of the stories.
This project shows a benefit of storytelling on developing prosocial behaviour at children preschool age, so it should be used more often in teacher s every day work.
Key words: mental health, storytelling, prosocial behaviour
