I finally got round to finishing our Brown Bear story sticks. I’d seen the idea for story sticks a while ago on the internethere and they’ve been half-finished on the table for months!
Story sticks are used as an accompaniment to stories, a way of involving the children and providing an opportunity to extend their learning and enjoyment of the story. I know myself the children like to play an active role when we read books, joining in with repetitive parts and pointing out particular objects on the page. It can get a bit hectic at times, when everyone is keen to participate! With story sticks, each child has their own stick and adds counters to it as the story is read.
I chose Brown Bear Brown Bear by Eric Carle because as well as being one of the children’s favourites, the different animal images made the story easily adaptable to story sticks.
I then made templates for the images from the story. The pdf is available here if anyone wants to use it. I laminated the images, but was still a bit worried little fingers would be tempted to bend them, so stuck them on to plastic counters.
I then attached velcro to the back of each counter and we were ready to play!
I put all the counters in the middle of the table and as we read the story, the children looked for the correct counter and added it to their stick.
I realised at our first attempt at play, that I had forgotten the monkey!!
Carefully adding the counters to his stick!
Some of us found an alternative use for our sticks, namely swatting the counters to send them flying across the table!
Some of us were so keen, that we helped everyone else to find the correct counter!
Helping to tidy away once we had finished.
This proved to be popular too, so we had to divide up the jobs, one person removing the counters from the sticks and the other placing them back in the bag!
I’ve just used a plastic zip wallet to store our sticks and counters.
