Story Strips

I have a son who is obsessed with polar bears. He has a plethora of other animals he is obsessed with as well, but for today we focused on the polar bears. I had found a resource on the Sylvan Dell Publishing website with many activities based on the book, In Arctic Waters, so I printed out a few. Most of the "teaching activities" they've come up with are way too advanced for my kids, but they provided a jumping off point from which I could come up with some interesting things for us to do.

The thing my kids ended up liking the best was a little thing I called "Polar Bear Story Strips." I had printed out a sequencing activity from the In Arctic Waters resource page, and we used it to make up our own stories. I cut up all the little strips the website provided and set them out, randomly, on the floor. Then I chose one strip to be the first strip and used the picture on it to start telling a story that I would make up as I went along. After a few sentences, I would chose another strip and continue my story utilizing the picture on the second strip. I continued in this way until all the strips were placed in order, in a column, and I had told a story that included all the pictures in that order.

Now it was the boys' turn. We mixed up all the strips and my oldest followed my example. He chose his own first strip, second strip and so forth and as he chose them he told a story to follow the pictures. It was great! Sometimes he would get stuck with two pictures that didn't really go together very well and look to me for help. No problem, I would just prompt him with a few creative ways to get around it and he would take one of my ideas and run with it. For my younger son, who is also a great story teller, I would just have to offer a little more support. For example, I would ask him, "What do you want to go first?" and he would pick something out and after watching the rest of us do it, he knew that he was expected to come up with a sentence or phrase to accompany the picture. Then he would look at me and I would have to say, "What do you want to go next?" and we would continue in this manner until he had used up all the story strips and told a whole story. After a few times around, both boys could create all their own stories with absolutely no help from me. AND, the best part is, that they LOVED it!

Eventually, we decided to jointly create a story that we had to agree on being our most favorite way to have the strips put together. When we finally got it JUST right, we glued it to paper and hung it on the wall to come back and read whenever we felt the urge.