Want a fun way to encourage story telling and writing in your home?  Create a story board!

If you are sew crafty, you can sew some pockets onto a larger piece of fabric.  If you don’t sew, what about using poster board and gluing or stapling on paper pockets?

I sewed 12 pockets (about 4 inches wide, although next time I may make them larger) onto a large piece of felt.  Those are 3×5 cards, just for size reference.

Label these pockets.  We used the 5 W’s and ‘How’

Fill your pockets up with your ideas.  For example, ‘who’ could be grandma, Snoopy and Woodstock, the cat, Frosty the Snowman… ‘where’ might be the cellar, on Mars, under the table… Get the picture?

Then, have your kids take one piece of paper from each pocket without peeking at them.  With these they can create their story.  They can tell the story, act it out, write it down, draw it… however they want to create their story.  It can lead to some great fun!

And you don’t have to stop at the 5 W’s.  You can put whatever label on these pockets that you like.  For younger ones you can put a color, shape, letter, or number label on each pocket.  We put colors on each pocket and had Leif sort colored tiles and blocks.  You could do the same with shapes, letters and numbers using toys, refrigerator letter and number magnets, etc.

Kaia just went to the story board and pulled out these:

• Who: Mom and Dad
• What: Got an ugly haircut
• When: in the distant future
• Where: in a dungeon
• Why: Because he burned his tongue

So… what kind of story would you make with this?

Kaia and I took a break from our regularly scheduled math this morning after seeing some of these videos by Vihart.  She calls herself a ‘recreational mathemusician’, but that doesn’t come near describing how cool her brain is!  By watching just a couple of her videos Kaia and I found ourselves discussing fractals (again) which she loves, the concept of infinity, mobius strips, and a bunch more mathematical concepts.  For a 7 year old, that’s pretty advanced math.  But, when you bring it down to art, it seems so much easier to grasp.

Kaia immediately grabbed some paper and a pencil and set to doodling.

Here’s her ‘infinite series of circles, inside of an infinite number of circles”!

And more math doodles.

What a great way to spend a morning!

Here’s Vi’s blog if you want more of her creative mind!