Preschool Activities: Language: Creating Fairy Tales
Preschool Language Activity: Creating Fairy Tales
Ages: 3 and up
Develops: Speech & Language, Cognition
We all know that reading and singing to your child(ren) from day one is extremely important in gaining speech and language and cognition. Early exposure is key to gaining a wide variety of language, beginning understanding of grammar, as well as creativity. When your children become a bit older, there are different ways to help build cognition and language skills; this fairy tale building exercise is just the type of activity to spark your child’s interest and introduce them to a whole new side of stories.
When children tell stories, either recalling events, or making something up, it helps to develop sequence of events, speech and language, cognition, and imagination. This exercise can be done in a variety of different ways, with whatever materials you have on hand. The important part of this exercise is try and have your child build their own story from start to finish.
How to build a fairy tale:
Supplies:
pictures (pictures cut out of a magazine, coloring pages, old books that have been ripped, felt stories, magnets etc.)
place to display pictures (plain wall, poster board, felt board, magnet board)
tape
book (folding stapled into a book, or purchased plain book from craft store)
Instructions
First cut out or pick out desired pictures for the stories: For younger children, I would start with 3 or 4 pictures or ideas. Start with beginning, middle (1 or 2x), and end.
Align the pictures up on a poster board or plain wall to see the idea spatially.
Talk about the order and sequence of events and what is happening. Do this with them, not for them. You can use prompts to help get them to think about their pictures and formulate ideas. For example, “I see a cat, what is the cat going to do?”
Repeat the thoughts back to them
Once they have an idea of what the pictures and characters are doing in their story, you can tape or glue it into their story. Ask them again to go the pictures and this time write it down on each page to create the story.
Once the story is created, read it back to them!
Here are a few pages of the finished story. Once the pictures are visually laid out, they can begin to get an idea of how the story will look and sound. To help your child, you can give an example of a story by saying a few sentences about each picture. Talking about the pictures will give your child an an idea of how the story will flow. After we talked about the pictures, we moved them to a book. Then we went through each picture and each page, creating out the story line and dialogue. Your child can write the story on their own, or you can write the story for them, as they are telling you. My daughter had such a fun time creating her own story line, writing it out, then having me read it back to her.
Looking for more preschool activities? Check out this preschool counting activity and this preschool STEM cranberry build.
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