Monday 6 June 2016

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
Rosegrove 

Artists involved

ARTISTS
Hannah Stringer
Kerris Casey St Pierre of Spiral Designs
Gordon MacLellan - Creeping Toad - me!


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