worksheets for stories with young children

Stories Alive! the worksheets

Ideas for creating adventurous stories, songs, poems, palaces and sacks!

a storyworld taking shape

Over 2015, Stories Alive! placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire. Our teams have been challenged to develop sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are all working with. There have been storyhouses built, storysacks made, stories mapped, little adventures, big adventures, whole storyworlds of adventure. 

a storyhouse

Out of all the Stories Alive! workshops and twilight sessions, we have grown a spreading collection of activities to use with young children. Some of our activities needed lots of bits (but rarely very specialised), others just needed people, some plastic plates and a few minutes. We have drawn activities together, distilling them into a set of worksheets which are now available (free of charge) for downloading (please go to this page on my website to find the download).

We offer these activities to anyone who is interested. Please feel free to use them – but if you want to post them somewhere else please acknowledge Stories Alive! as a source. This website could be included as an information point about the project and my email used as a first contact (I can always refer enquiries on to a more relevant person).

The activities are not final. In many ways these are our working notes. We have tried to avoid repetition but at times there are overlaps between activities. We kept them all in, knowing that different people suit different styles: so please sift, choose and experiment. We hope you will have as much fun as we did – or even more.

If you do download a set of worksheets, it would be good to hear from you – even just to say who you are and where you hope to be making up stories with young children…

a plastic plate adventure

Adventure booklet: we have also produced a little booklet designed for use by families to create their own adventure. This uses some of the worksheet activities but aims to keep everything very straightforward so a slightly harassed parent with some over-excited children in the local park could all work together to create their own adventures.

There will a few extra hard copies of this available (summer 2016) – if you would like a copy let me know and I’ll see what we can do. A downloadable version might go on here shortly

Nursery schools involved

Taywood 

Newtown

Rockwood

Basnett Street

Rosegrove 

Artists involved

ARTISTS

Carol Ferro

Hannah Stringer

Kerris Casey St Pierre of Spiral Designs

Ben McCabe

Gordon MacLellan - Creeping Toad - me!

Stories Alive! a thunderstorm of chopsticks

Stories Alive!

twilight music 

18th Jan 2016

it's quite hard to catch stamping feet....

Ben wrestles sticky tape

We began with noise…

This was a twilight session for teaching staff from the 5 nursery schools of the Stories Alive! Project. As the project draws to a close, we have been looking at areas we would like to develop more – not necessarily as a project but perhaps within individual nurseries. Our musician/storyteller, Ben McCabe had done an excellent job of inspiring both children and  staff musically during earlier workshops, giving all of us new confidence  in ourselves as musical people, so we gathered for an afterschool session with him.

We began with noise….

Over 2015, Stories Alive! placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire. Our teams have been challenged to develop sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are all working with. There have been storyhouses built, storysacks made, stories mapped, little adventures, big adventures, whole storyworlds of adventure. Because of the carefulness of photographs of young children, I’ve charted relatively little of the project so far but will hopefully catch up a bit now….

So we began with noise….

chair drummers, poised

We sang a journey: improvising an adventure with repeating sounds, actions and words, reflecting on the value of combining sound and movement. We played musical I-spy, creating improbable stories with improvised lines

It wasn’t all just fun, you know. We talked about the importance of playing with sounds for developing verbal skills. We thought about rhythm, story structure, dance and the abstract thought processes that represent action or objects with sounds and the value of recording patterns of sound - creating group scores as a way of thinking about writing. And we made a spectacular amount of noise with sets of cooking chopsticks (other wooden rods are available) on the backs of chairs (other furniture is also available)

ready for action

And that was fun. The rest of the evening was fun, too, but this was spectacular. A rippling seashore of noise breaking over the chairs: rattles and scrapes and thumps and scratches and 50 people laughing and concentrating and releasing a thunderstorm in a school hall

This has been a good project. This is still proving to be a good project!

Nursery schools involved

Taywood 

Newtown

Rockwood

Basnett Street

Rosegrove 

thunder

Stories Alive! is supported by Grants for the Arts 

and the Stocks Massey Bequest

By Rosegrove and Rockwood

 

By Rosegrove and Rockwood, 

stories grow over grass and over stone, 

by tree and leaf, 

under the watchful eyes of escaping chickens,

Rosegrove and Rockwood Nurseries, May 2015

 

Rosegrove: mapping adventures

In workshops at these two nurseries we've been using key questions to propel our storymaking forward

In Rosegrove, back in March, we started by asking

who would we send on an adventure? making little characters who then went out exploring, collecting useful items as we went. A simple collection of found objects on a plate was often enough to start spinning stories

Then we wondered

where does our adventure start (or end?) - who lives behind that door? - a  question about where would we go - and for this everyone made little houses for their characters inspiring questions about friendships and secrecy and the hidden doors and homes that might lurk in the school grounds

hidden homes in the Nursery garden

And finally we thought about

what would we (our characters) bring back from our adventure?: giving us a chance to map big stories, working together to devise landscapes where our house-boxes could be positioned, planning perils and problems and choosing trophies, treasures, mementoes to bring back - although those same finds sometimes sent our characters away to their next adventure - scallop shells make very good boats for small people and wide oceans….

Rockwood Day 3: first ideas

In Rockwood, questions also took other groups into houses but here, children worked together to make magnificent log-mansions where the planning and decoration of a shared house could take a whole session. This work drew out all sorts of wonders: poles to keep dragons away on one house were replaced by landing pads on another. Different doors led to different homes (monsters and fairies in one combination). The Tooth Fairy decorated the outside of her house with teeth. Feathers decorated another. A dragon devised a seaside house with shells and sandcastles

None of our workshops finished stories: our role as visiting artists here was to provoke conversation, to get stories moving and encourage staff and children to enjoy the stories that might grow out of their school grounds.

Rockwood: house building carefully

 

Rockwood: planning a ladder

Rosegrove: fireworks to keep us safe

Cooper's Magic Potion (Rosegrove)

A fish,

A shell,

a cup and a toadstool.

Some tea,

Some juice,

Soemthing squeezed from a boot

A dinosaur skull,

A helmet,

A bead and some sand.

Stir them up,

Mix them well,

And if it works,

I can't tell

Stories Alive! has placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire with the challenge of developing 5 different sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are working with

Stories Alive!: Once upon a time in ancient China….

Rockwood Nursery School

11th March 2014

an exploration of Chinese New Year 

begins with a story and 

grows new adventures

 

a lion and a dragon

Once upon a time there was a lion, a hungry lion….

The adventure began with a storywalk. Outdoors, through bushes and play equipment, behind trees, over grass, under climbing frames, children followed the lion, Nyan's, trail through the Rockwood wilderness

As they met the unfolding story, children looked for lanterns, found dragons, and a shelter for the (very tasty-looking!) goat, listening to and playing with the story at the same time

These outdoor sessions were great fun and well received despite increasingly soggy conditions as the day progressed. With the rain and the excitement of going for a walk with a dragon (and a certain degree of worry that there might be a lion about), we did wonder how much of the story our young storytellers would remember

 

a heroic dragon spreading over several pages

Indoors, however, they joined me* to tell me the story they had just adventured through and go on to draw the story in folded-paper books. There was a powerful lesson here in seeing that almost everyone, especially working together where children could fill in each other's gaps, every group, even the very wettest ones, could tell the story back to me and then go on to improvise around it in their own books. 

         ~ our brave dragon changed size, colour and nature

         ~ Nyan was usually a lion but occasionally tigers were more frightening

         ~ the Goat might remain a goat but was also occasionally a sheep, a donkey, or a rabbit.

But everyone was always sure that red is the colour of good luck and safety and red scares the monsters away.

Nyan's story tied in with the beginning of the Year of the Goat (or the Sheep) and was the first of a number of activities the children went on to do over the next few days, adding more experiences to their Chinese New Year celebrations

 

even a delicate fan could scare a monster away

For Stories Alive!, it was good to see how enthusiastically our children would both use the thread of a story to explore the school grounds and how well they listened and remembered, especially those the moments they had been active in, using that memory to help rebuild the whole story around

* 2 artists involved: Hannah Stringer, Rockwood's artist-in-residence, planned and set up the sessions while I came in as an extra pair of hands and useful colouring pencil
(photos: more pictures are pending - waiting for a chance to check with families as to which ones we can show - they'll come in after the holidays)

Stories Alive! has placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire with the challenge of developing 5 different sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are working with