This paper is based on the principles of speech development in preschool-aged children. It emphasizes the importance of storytelling in early childhood and its influence on the development of children's speech abilities, including vocabulary enrichment. Since a child needs to be introduced to stories, the role of the environment in which the child is situated is essential. The social environment is particulary important, followed by the material environment in the form of incentive that can develop the child's motivation for storytelling. This highlights the importance of personal storytelling, narrating, and retelling. Through careful selection of stories and competent storytelling, the child broadens their understanding of the world around them, faces specific fears and challenges, identifies with the story, pays attention, learns to reason morally, develops imagination, and improves their speech and language skills. The goal of this paper and research is to examine the impact of reading stories on a child's acquisition of new words and vocabulary enrichment. The research was conducted in the ˝Košnica˝ kindergarten in Zagreb, with an older age group. During the research, several stories were told to the children, and the study examined how many and which words they used when reproducing content, that is, retelling the stories. The obtained results showed the use of target words in a percentage of 7 to 100 percent, that is, the most frequent word was used by all children, and the last frequent was used by one child.