National Storytelling Week: Turn your students into storytellers with these free tools

Posted on 23 January 2015

Spark your students’ imaginations and help them bring stories to life with these free resources for storytelling, for National Storytelling Week (31st January – 7th February).

+Resources marked with a plus-sign are subscriber-only resources available for free for a limited time only. For year-round access to more great teaching tools, subscribe to Child Education or Nursery Education for only £15 for 12 months.

Story Starters

+ Adventure story starter . Turn story writing into an adventure by letting your class decide what happens next.

+ Clouds-themed story starter . Ask children to finish this story about clouds.

+ Every picture tells a story – Story starter sheet . Use these three thought-provoking images to engage children with creative writing.

+ Musical stories – Interactive story starter resource . Arranged into four different themes – traditional fairy tale, outer space, jungle and spooky – this audio and visual resource is ideal for inspiring children’s creative writing.

+ Setting the scene – Interactive story starter . This interactive audio-visual resource aims to stimulate children’s imaginations to produce stories that will excite both writers and readers. Its five scenes each include sound effects, background information, ideas for telling stories from different points of view and what might happen next.

+ Story beginnings and ends – Slideshow . This slideshow includes images that represent the beginning and end of a story. Use them to stimulate children’s speaking and listening skills.

Story openings – Activity sheet . Investigate story openings and spot useful techniques in action.

+ Story starter poster . Use this beautifully illustrated poster as a stimulus for story writing.

Sequencing

Goldilocks and the Three Bears – Sequencing story pictures . Encourage children to retell the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ in their own words using these story pictures.

+ Goldilocks: Tell It Yourself – Interactive sequencing resource . Sequence the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ using this interactive resource.

Hey diddle diddle – Interactive sequencing resource . Use this interactive drag-and-drop scene to help children learn about story order.

Telling Stories

+ Jungle Story Kit – Interactive resource . A complete interactive story kit. Choose from jungle scenes, animal characters, sound effects, speech bubbles and sentences to create a storyboard. Features connectives, sample phrases and full on-screen instructions.

+ Stories of the sea – Interactive multimedia resource . Electronic story-frame for planning and telling stories on a sea theme. With a choice of characters, settings, opening and ending sentences, connectives, speech and thought bubbles, similes, metaphors and sound effects.

Story planner activity sheet . This useful activity sheet helps your class to plan a story before writing it.

+ Talk about…stories – Discussion cards . These colourful discussion cards can be used to prompt talk about stories in your classroom.

Tell me a story – Interactive resource . Are your class stuck for story ideas? Let them use our interactive poster to automatically select settings, people and situations

Tell me a story – Poster . A non-competitive game supporting oral storytelling, using a variety of settings, characters and scenarios

Tell me a story – Activity sheet . Useful words and phrases that can be used in storytelling

Telling a good story – Evaluation report . This activity sheet can be used to evaluate and give feedback on a classmate’s storytelling performance.

Whole-class story book – Activity sheet . This is a simple design for a whole-class story book. Start the class off with the opening line of a story and get each child to contribute a page.

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