Telling stories builds speech, language, and pre-literacy skills as children create a beginning, middle and end to their story, sequence and link concepts together to brainstorm a cohesive story. Fun materials stimulate thinking whether in speech therapy or at home in the playroom
Recently, I blogged about Rory’s Story Cubes which are a series of dice like blocks with somewhat abstract drawings on all sides so kids can roll them and put them in order as they put a story together. This game was nominated for Toy of the Year in 2010.
Another great educational toy for encouraging kids to create stories is “Tell Me A Story Cards” by eeboo. I used Mystery in the Forest and Robot cards to get my young authors going. The forest cards are colorful, fanciful, picture cards that have different combinations of repeated objects for spinning a story—a treasure chest, golden coins, a special button, a large spool of pink thread, a lock and key, and presents. Characters include birds penning notes, a princess letting a bird out of his cage, kids riding the moon with their big spool of thread, a raccoon reading a map or a hen carrying a basketful of gold coins. Younger kids benefited from playing with an adult or older child as they took turns adding to the story, while older children could take the lead alone. The Robot card set similarly had a cast of mechanical characters of different sizes and abilities including a robot fish. Space ships, craters in mountains, a space station, chocolate cake, and a steel box were options to add on to our story.
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author. “Tell Me a Story Cards’ were provided for review by eeboo.
