Operation Play Time - Book Marathon

Today's Operation Playtime task is the book marathon.

As you can guess as people who have a company selling educational items - we love reading and our two year old would spend every day 'reading' his Mr Men collection or Thomas collection and our four year old has just discovered the joys of the Oxford Reading Tree school reading scheme and "can really read real words now" as he told us yesterday.

Here's a favourite book and a 'reading' activity:

First Thousand Words - This first word book has friendly scenes to encourage the direct association of words with objects and reinforce known words. Each page has a scene with labelled objects to discuss - great for increasing expressive and receptive language. Also contains illustrations for body parts, occupations, actions, opposites, time, weather, colours, shapes and numbers.

We can spend hours on each page just talking about the picture, finding all the things listed and then linking it to our experiences, songs, other books - it's and endless resource.

Cinderella Puppet Set - This seven puppet story set comes with a detailed story card to help you tell the story of Cinderella and contains the main characters you would expect to find from this enchanting favourite story. Each character is a finger puppet has an open loop on the back to allow finger access either upwards or downwards, a particularly useful feature when using with a puppet theatre.

We love acting out stories with puppets - they really help children understand what is happening, remember the story and help them use their imagination.

New Products: Fantastic Fairy Tale Puppets

We have now added four new sets of story puppets - Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Billy Goats Gruff to our range of puppets.

These fantastic puppet sets are come with a detailed story card to help you tell the story of the fairy tale and contains the main characters you would expect to find in the enchanting favourite story.



These puppet sets are great for children learning traditional tales, beginning role play activities and are ideal for giving as a gift coming in it's very own see-through PVC handy bag / carry case. They are also a great for inclusion in story sacks.

We also now have all of the other story sets: Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Little Red Riding Hood back in stock.

Developing Imagination / Story Skills

I was reading a post on a parenting forum yesterday about encouraging children's imaginative development and there were some great ideas so I thought I'd share some with you.

Make sure that you spend time reading and sharing a variety of different books, stories and rhymes because the more ideas your child comes into contact with the more ideas they have to build on when creating their own stories. Ask questions when sharing stories; for example, why do you think that happened? how did he feel? what do you think will happen next?

Try to think imaginatively yourself when showing you child stories, use story sacks to develop story ideas. Gather props relating to stories for example puppets and games and use these to enact the stories. Make props such as wooden spoon puppets, playdoh food and cardboard box houses to help you.

For children who really struggle with writing / drawing / thinking imaginatively the Nonsenses puzzle. These puzzles encourage reading and building sentences; each card has a character, place or an action and by mixing the beginning, middle and end pieces you can have hours of fun as you try to compete to come up with the silliest sentences possible!

Make stories up co-operatively; depending on your child's drawing / writing ability there are several ways you can do it. The most simple way is to do it orally, you start a story and then take it turn to say a sentence or part of a sentence and see how silly it can get and how much detail you can put into it. If your child likes drawing you can make a story board by drawing squares on paper (start with just a few squares and then build up to longer ones as your child gets more confident) and taking it in turns to draw the next picture in the story. If you child struggles with drawing you could ask them to tell you what to draw and draw if for them. Lastly you can create stories by writing ideas down, take a strip of paper each and write down a character, fold it over and swap and add a location, fold and swap again and add an activity, fold and swap etc building up ideas and then open them out to see what has happened.

Draw random shapes / lines on a piece of paper and see what your child can make them become, for example a square could become a house, a circle could be made into a pig and a triangle could become the sail of a boat or the top of a rocket a wavy line could become the sea or turned into a caterpillar. This a great game for children who need to practice their fine motor and drawing skills too.

As with all learning activities the key is to keep it fun.

Puppets now available at Littlesheep Learning

I've just realised I didn't write a blog post a few weeks ago that I kept meaning to write and that was about my trip to the Autumn Fair - a massive trade fair at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham. I spent a day networking with other WAHMs (the people behind Knot Just Jigs, PinkFairyCake, Boutiquetoyou, Gifts for Little People, Little Milestones, Kiddymania - shout if I've left you out?) and the best part of the day was sourcing some new products, the first of which - some lovely puppets have now arrived and are available to buy at Littlesheep Learning.

These puppets are great for use in Story Sacks, to provide a visual reference point and to make learning fun.

People Who Help Us Teaching Mitt
A great glove pupppet for learning about occupations and the jobs people do. The puppet fits an adults hand and includes the following roles: fireman, policeman, postman, nurse and doctor.

Expressions Teaching Mitt
A fabulous glove puppet for talking about emotions; featuring happy, sad, angry, surprised and worried.

Plus Five Little Ducks, Five Little Speckled Frogs and Ten in a Bed to provide a visual aid when singing these favourite counting rhymes.

We have also added story puppets and first animal finger puppets - more about them another day!

National Story Telling Week 2007

Yesterday I held a coffee morning for other mums / dads and small children along with a photographer and a reporter for the local paper, the reason for this is that this week (30th January to 4th February) it's National Storytelling Week and they wanted to know our opinions on sharing stories with our children.

National Storytelling week is an annual event which aims to raise awareness of this ancient form of entertainment - check out The Society for Storytelling for more information. Storytelling is the ancient tradition stretching back for as long as humans have had speech, known as the 'oral' tradition where stories are shared in groups. The storyteller is an artist, an entertainer and an educator who uses words to take you on a journey of the imagination. Each person will hear something different as the story is created in the space between the teller and the listener.

Storytellers tell traditional folk tales, written tales, anecdotes, urban myths, stories from history, religious or moral tales and stories they have created themselves or which have been created for a specific event. Some storytellers will create a story spontaneously to suit the audience. They tell stories from memory rather than reading them from the book, memorising stories image by image not word for word and may tell a story differently each time they tell it, interacting with their audience, choosing stories and images to communicate with them and some use music, dance, song, pictures or puppets.

Storytelling supports literacy development, storytellers can improve concentration, listening skills and help develop and enrich spoken and written language. Hearing and retelling traditional tales can provide scaffolding for children’s own imaginative stories, giving the child a variety of frameworks to work from.