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

Stories Alive! - Superheroes in Taywood

Superhero Storytelling 

at Taywood Nursery 

with Pippa Pixley

a report from a superhero workspace....

At Taywood Nursery many of the children evidenced a real interest in superheroes.  To support their interest, and to expand upon it, the children had enjoyed stories such as Traction Man by Mini Gray, Super Duck by Jez Alborough and Super Daisy by Kes Gray & Nick Sharratt.  As part of continuous provision a tray of old comic books was made available they could cut up and rearrange to make their own stories.

During Pippa’s visit the children could access a large box of superhero stuff, providing opportunities to explore imaginative play with capes, masks and wristbands.  Little superheroes soared, zipped and zoomed as they created stories using puppets.  Pippa used open questions to encourage the children to think about what could happen next in their adventure.  They explored the sounds the characters make, such as “Roaaaar” and “Stomp, stomp, stomp“.  They added actions using their hands and fingers (big scary claws!), as well as using facial expressions to enhance the story, making the telling exciting and fun!

Everyone sang rhymes and role-played being superheroes.  This naturally led to retelling the story.  The groups of children started by creating pictures of the characters and the situations on a large roll of paper.  Some drew large zig-zaggy scribbles for big teeth and then added words using emergent writing, while others linked the story elements with continuous lines to create story maps.  The story text was then transcribed on a separate piece of paper and hung in the hallway alongside their work for the parents to read.

Here is an example of how one group of children collaborated to make their story:

Several children are choosing characters for their story from a resource box . . .

Keziah –             Superheroes eat superhero food!

                        Superheroes eat ice.

                        Superheroes eat sausage rolls.

                        Superheroes eat cheese.

                        Superheroes eat smoothies:

Strawberry, banana, pear, blackcurrant, orange juice . . .

Angel -             Put in the bowl and press the button – mmmmmmmmm . . .

                        Healthy superheroes.

Sam chose the T-Rex . . .

Sam -                         Big feet, spineasaurus. Big, scary claws!

Angel -             Loud sound: STAMP, STAMP!!!

Keziah chose the pig . . .

Keziah -             Baby pig was crying, wants his mummy, couldn’t find his mummy.

                        Along came a dinosaur: STOMP, STOMP!!!

                        Pig crying: wee, wee, wee, wee!

                        Dinosaur roared: ROAAAAH!!!!

Sam -                         He wanted to eat him! (Sam “grumbled” for the dinosaur)

Keziah -            Pig cried again: wee, wee, wee, wee!

Ocean -            Brought Super Sammy Seal to fly to the rescue!

Sam -                        The dinosaur broke his neck and died. The End!

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