Reading and making up your own stories can be a rewarding, magical and educational way to bond and have fun with your child, while they learn valuable skills to help them with reading and self-expression for the future. Their imaginations can run wild, and so can yours!
Sometimes you need a few quick ideas to get your creativity flowing though, and we use our marvellous Story Cubes to create magical never-heard-before-tales with visitors. The Story Cubes act as visual prompts to kickstart imaginations. Each cube has a different picture on each face, so we throw the cube to decide elements of the story:
- Cube 1 has different characters on each side
- Cube 2 has settings for the story to happen in
- Cube 3 has objects to use in the story, etc…
And as we form our stories, our team of Enablers are on-hand to provide ideas along the way and help steer the story to a fantastical conclusion.
You don’t need giant story cubes to use this method at home though – you can re-create the Story Cube activity at home with one of these:
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Do you remember these? We’ve been debating what they are called (fortune tellers?), but we ALL made them at school, seeing who made the most entertaining or smallest, most minute version they could.
These story-tellers are very simple to make and a great way to kickstart a brand new story with your child, and here are some instructions for how to make the paper shape!
The difference from the fortune-tellers you (probably) made at school, is that you can draw characters, write, or cut out and stick pictures from magazines onto the story-teller, then use it as a prompt for your story!
For example, the outside choices could be for your main character, who will travel through your story, the second layer of choices are locations, where the story will take place and the third layer the quests or adventures your main character could embark or be sent on. That’s what we tried on ours and it worked really well/
So, where will your imaginations take you on your stort-telling travels?
We’d love to see pictures of your story-tellers, so make sure you tag #EurekaMuseum if you share them online, or bring them with you on your next visit and one of our Enablers would love to create a story with you!
By: Rachel Skinner
By: Sophie Ballinger
