Storytelling in preschool children’s education has been a well-established practice for many years. However, the majority of existing research has been scattered throughout the realms of traditional storytelling, picture storybooks, digital storytelling and even more recent artificial intelligence (AI) supported storytelling practices. Consequently, a synthesis of research that systematically explores the various manifestations of storytelling in relation to preschool children’s creativity and learning is lacking. This study examines the ways in which a variety of forms of storytelling support children’s creativity, imagination, language and literacy, cognitive development and emerging co-creativity. Utilizing a library research design, the study retrieved and reviewed journal articles, conference papers, books and other academic sources. Sources were selected that had been published between the years 2000 and 2026. The resulting body of literature was analyzed thematically to create four categories of storytelling: traditional storytelling, language and literacy, cognitive development and digital/AI-supported creative storytelling. The findings of the study reveal that, in addition to facilitating children’s imagination and creative expression, storytelling also contributes to children’s vocabulary, comprehension, verbal expression, narrative thinking and literacy. In addition to these outcomes associated with traditional forms of storytelling, digital storytelling also supports children’s cognitive learning and a range of skills including narrative writing, observation, classification and prediction. Recently, AI-supported creative storytelling has begun to be researched with a focus on children’s verbal creativity, reporting increases in children’s fluency, flexibility and elaboration; however, results for originality have been less consistent. The study concludes that storytelling has evolved into a highly multimodal, interactive and co-creative site of pedagogy and that traditional and technology-supported storytelling can be integrated in order to support preschool children’s creative learning.
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