Kids are great story tellers and “Tall Tales” gets their imaginations going as they reach into the blue fuzzy bag to pick a story character or prop to give direction to the plot. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about this game from therapists and teachers but today I had the privilege of playing it with 3 first graders. They sat right down and got the game going, choosing a a Tall Tales Environment card (setting) and took turns choosing a story piece. I commented on how cute the pieces were–flower, dinosaur, rocket ship and others and my friend said, “And they’re squishy too!” When I asked my first grade experts how to play the game, they said, “You try to make a story to match the picture and you can’t peek in the bag!” Our story started out with the airplane setting and book prop, “She’s going to Florida and took a ‘book’ with her to read on the plane.” The kids kept adding setting cards–airplane, game show spinner, farm and so on. They didn’t skip a beat in choosing their object and relating it to the next scene card. At one point a “rocket” flew to the “spinner” (game show card), the “robot” landed on the spinner and it moved the spinner so he got $1,000 or a “dragon.” It was fascinating to hear how they blended a new object and setting into the next part of the story. Teachers and therapists are excited about this game too as kids keep asking to play it while they are learning essential language skills of story telling, association, naming and description that feed into reading and writing.

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