One of our areas of focus at the moment is story writing. My oldest is not a fan of writing stories, she says she never knows what to write. And when she does write she tends to write facts, not that there is anything wrong with facts but I want to try to get her comfortable writing creative stories (she has an amazing imagination so the stories are there it is just getting them out onto paper).
So we have come up with a fun activity that both the kids have been enjoying. We have been combining some themed writing paper with our story starter cubes and both kids have been making up stories (well with my youngest it is more just sentences).
It has been a great way of getting my daughter to stop focusing on the facts and just have some fun with her writing. We stopped worrying about would giraffes really be found on an island and what habitat do they need to survive and instead just went with the unusual situations created by combining the different words / phrases on the story cubes.
The Story starter cube set comes with six different cubes in the set – 2 character cubes, 2 situation cubes and 2 settings cubes. The cubes are made from a lovely soft foam and both my kids, who are tactile defensive have commented on how nice the cubes feel. My kids love rolling them and seeing what crazy scenarios they can come up with, the crazier the better.
And yes we started this as a fun writing activity for my daughter but as usual my youngest joined in. With my youngest we used the handwriting version of the themed story pages as he is still working on getting the size of his letters correct. And he would normally only write one sentence. But that one sentence included lots of new words for him and he was joining in every time my daughter did the activity. So he was writing a lot more than he would have usually just because he wanted to roll the story cubes and see what crazy sentence he could come up with.
And some times he would stick around and do multiple themed pages in one go (something which is unheard of with him).
So has playing around with story cubes helped ? Well this past weekend I found my daughter sitting at the table writing out a story. No-one had suggested it, it was just her idea to put a story down on paper. For us this is a massive step forward and something we really want to encourage.
The themed story paper that we used is from Activity Village – they have a wide selection of themed pages and they have normal lined pages and handwriting pages (handwriting pages are the ones with the dotted middle line to help the kids know where the small letters go).
Our Story start cubes are these one from Learning Resources – Learning Resources Story Starter Word Cubes
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