Exploring Our Children’s Potentials

Lately I’ve been encouraging Anya to create stories with me. I’d start with a sentence or two, and I’d let her imagine how the story will go from there (by telling me another one or two sentences). We both then take turns in creating one scenario after another until we sort of create an ‘ending’ to it.

With this I hope to let her imagination soar, learn to story-tell and basically just have a little fun.

To make this a little more interesting, we made the setting a bit more ‘real’ the other day. And we made a little forest!

Especially since we already have two ‘palm trees’!

[Anya recently learned about ‘growth’ at Sunday School – how just like a little seed that grows and becomes a fruitful tree, we too should grow spiritually – and she made ‘palm trees’ as part of their activities. They cut out a few leaf-shaped foam sheet and stuck them on ice cream sticks. And to make them ‘stand’, they placed the sticks on a rectangular styrofoam]

What we used :

– Used cereal box (as the base)

– Green-coloured paper cartons (for the grass)

– Scissors, glue

– Little toy animals (we used our dog clips, a donkey and a gorilla)

– A storybook with a ‘forest-looking page’ to be used as ‘background’

What we did :

– I opened up the cereal box, and cut out the uneven sides

– I cut the green-coloured cartons into 3 rectangular shapes. Anya then cut one side of each one of it to make it look like ‘spiky grass’

– We glued the three ‘grass’ cut-outs on the cereal box (with ‘paths’ in between), placed the ‘palm trees’ and the toy animals

– We placed the ‘forest page’ as the background (and placed something heavy on the back of the book as a ‘support’, as it’d otherwise collapse)

And that’s all about it really.

We then moved the animals around as we share our story and create our very own forest adventure!

PS: This of course is just a little idea to jumpstart your very own storytelling time with your little ones. Have fun!