Talking Hands Tale — A Gesture for Every Sentence

A storytelling game where hands help the words. You tell a very short story with a gesture for each sentence, the child copies, and then the child tells a story of their own with their hands “switched on”.

  1. Pick a tiny story of 4–5 sentences — real or made up. Example — “I climbed a tall ladder. I picked a round apple. It was so heavy. I took a big bite. Yuck — a worm! No thank you!”
  2. Tell it slowly with one clear gesture per sentence — hands climbing, fingers making a ball, arms sagging with the weight, a big bite, a head shake with a pushing-away hand.
  3. Tell it again and have the child join in with the gestures while you say the words.
  4. Third time, the child says the words and does the gestures. Prompt only with your hands, not your voice.
  5. Now ask the child for their own story — “Tell me about the playground today, and let your hands help.” Praise specific gestures you see (“I could tell how fast the slide was!”).
  6. Play back one moment — “Show me again how big the dog was” — to underline that their hands told you something.

Variation: play Hands Off / Hands On — the child describes something tricky (a spiral staircase, how to brush teeth, the shape of a favorite toy) while sitting on their hands, then again with hands free. Talk about which was easier to explain and to understand.

Requirements

  • Space: Any — works at the table, in the car (for the passenger) or at bedtime
  • Surface: None needed
  • Materials: None; a favorite picture book can supply the story
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; a second listener makes a nice audience
  • Supervision: Moderate — the adult models first, then listens

Rationale & Objective

Gestures that accompany speech are part of the message, not decoration. Goldin-Meadow’s research programme shows that children often express ideas in gesture before they can put them into words, and that gesturing while explaining lightens the mental load (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2001) and helps new learning stick (Cook, Mitchell & Goldin-Meadow, 2008). For storytelling specifically, Demir, Levine & Goldin-Meadow (2015) found that 5-year-olds who acted out a character’s actions with their own body while retelling a cartoon went on to tell better-structured stories over the following years. This exercise deliberately invites those iconic and character-viewpoint gestures (showing size, shape and action) alongside the conventional ones (nodding, head shake, pointing), so that the child experiences gesture as a tool that makes them easier to understand — the “uses gestures to supplement speech” skill in SLP pragmatic checklists.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: copies gestures only while the adult is doing them; own stories are told with still hands or with pointing only
  • Developing: reproduces most of the modelled gestures with the words; adds one or two size or action gestures in own stories when reminded
  • Proficient: spontaneously uses several different gestures (size, shape, action, nod or head shake) that match what is being said; gestures and words are well timed
  • Advanced: acts out what a character did from the character’s point of view; uses gesture to get across something they lack the word for, then asks for or finds the word; notices and reads other people’s gestures

Safety Notes

  • Leave room around the child — enthusiastic gestures knock over cups and hit siblings
  • Never mock or correct a child’s natural gestures, and never ask them to keep their hands still as a rule outside the short Hands Off game — suppressing gesture makes talking harder
  • Children who stutter or are shy talkers should not be pushed to perform; let them do gestures only while you supply the words
  • A 5-year-old who uses very few gestures of any kind (rarely points, waves, nods or shakes their head) should be discussed with a pediatrician or speech-language pathologist

Hints

  • Playfulness: choose stories with big physical moments — a giant, a tiny mouse, something slimy, something far too hot. Let the child invent the most ridiculous gesture for each
  • Sustain interest: take a story from the child’s day at dinner each evening, or re-tell a well-loved picture book “with hands”; let the child teach the gesture story to another adult
  • Common mistake: turning it into choreography where every gesture must be copied exactly. The goal is meaningful, natural gesture, not a memorised routine
  • No-equipment adaptation: nothing is needed — it works in a waiting room, on a walk or lying in bed with the lights low
  • Cross-domain: feeds directly into narrative retelling and sequencing (first, then, last); size and shape gestures support math and spatial vocabulary (tall, round, wide, between)
  • Progression: copy the adult’s gestures → say and gesture a modelled story → own story with a reminder → spontaneous gesture in everyday talk → Hands Off / Hands On comparison

Sources

  • Demir, Ö.E., Levine, S.C. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2015), “A tale of two hands: children’s early gesture use in narrative production predicts later narrative structure in speech,” Journal of Child Language
  • Cook, S.W., Mitchell, Z. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008), “Gesturing makes learning last,” Cognition
  • Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003), Hearing Gesture — How Our Hands Help Us Think, Harvard University Press
  • Iverson, J.M. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005), “Gesture paves the way for language development,” Psychological Science
  • ASHA — Social Communication Benchmarks (gesture use alongside speech)
  • Head Start ELOF — Language & Communication (Communicating and Speaking)