Contributed by Elizabeth Kate Longson

This is the tale of some mysterious, not so little, eggs.

Over the second half of the spring term my school was lucky enough to have some visiting duck and caterpillar eggs which we watched hatch and grow into ducklings and butterflies.

This was a magical experience for the children and they thought they had seen it all until…

Our final day of term when we had some mysterious, not so little, eggs appear in our cloakroom!

After many discussions about who had left them and what could be inside them, we were sent some ‘exclusive’ video footage that had been secretly recorded the night before. With a little bit of help from FXGURU our cloakroom came alive and a full-size T-Rex was walking around the eggs!

The children’s imaginations were running wild, any mark on the floors or walls had been caused by the dinosaur! However, as 4 and 5-year olds it was quite challenging to contain their ideas so that they could record their stories…

Thank goodness for Tales Toolkit!

All day the children were verbally telling the story, either using the dinosaur or the eggs as their main character. I spent much of the morning listening and towards the end of the morning I sat myself down in our ‘story telling area’ and started folding.

Folding? Folding paper to make books! Tales Toolkit provide online training on the importance of and how to create these books and the brilliance of this idea was also shown to me in a school workshop delivered by Paul Johnson, from The Book Art Project.

 This project teaches numerous ways to make books (without the classic stapling pages together!) and that, combined the Tales Toolkit initiative really encourages my children to write. So, as predicted, they couldn’t resist coming to have a look!

Soon I was surrounded by children, both boys and girls, asking if they could make a Tales Toolkit book.

I handed out the books and had already printed some of the mini Tales Toolkit symbols on paper, then I just watched as one girl started cutting out the symbols and sticking them on different pages.

Tales Toolkit also offer these pages pre-made for convenience on their website. However, if like me you’re having a big drive on fine motor control, getting the children to cut and stick is just taking advantage of this little extra development opportunity.

Anyway, after praising the girl for such a creative idea, they were suddenly all doing this!

Many of them then wandered off to independently record their stories – which was wonderful, until I found that most of the children know me too well… They realised I’d want to keep these books, so quickly hid their finished books in their bags so they could take them home, leaving me with very few samples!

Using Tales Toolkit with book making has been amazing, as the children are not only creating the stories, they are also writing books (with a little bit of help initially!).

Without Tales Toolkit, the children wouldn’t have been able to independently record in these books.

It has provided them with a structure to their story for them to logistically follow. As a result of Tales Toolkit, they have been really able to take ownership of their stories and are very proud of their final books, which explains why they all (very cleverly!) hid them in their book bags to take them home!!

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