‍Katie Copeland on Involving Parents in Tales Toolkit Stories

We have been using Tales Toolkit in our setting since September. We have been so impressed with the impact it has had on the children in so many different ways – improved confidence, concentration, creativity and motivation to record their ideas to name a few.

Our parents have also shown great interest in Tales Toolkit appearing in our setting and have been asking lots of questions about the symbols and resources. We have had some lovely comments when children have taken home booklets or big stories that they have created at school.

We were really keen to involve our parents in Tales Toolkit and so we felt a good way to do this, was to send home a story strip after a group story, featuring a photograph of the 4 elements used in our big bags. We have the strips already prepared with our covering letter as we feel it is important it goes home the same day the story has been created. This means we can very quickly add 4 images to them. We encourage all parents to use the strip as a prompt to let their child retell the story to them at home. We have said we would love to have the strips returned to school so we can read the children’s responses, but there is no obligation to do this.

Here’s what our letter to parents looked like:

It has been fantastic to read the stories that do come back to school. As the parents haven’t heard the stories themselves you can really see which parts the children did or didn’t remember. We have definitely noticed the parts of the stories with lots of actions and participation from the children are remembered.

This is Olivia’s story:

You can see a few more of the children’s stories here:

Katie Copeland at Smithy Bridge Primary School