Leaf Characters - Creating Mark-Making Stories Outside

For the past few weeks we had been planning into adult group times the opportunities to make up oral stories through the structure that Tales Toolkit has provided. Here, the children had become familiar with the structure of a story and were increasingly confident in making suggestions to direct the story. We played inside and outside developing stories and focused on high quality interactions with the children and what this should look like.

After the October half-term we met as a team to continue our training with session 3 and took the time to discuss our own next steps for the children. After our baseline stories for the trial we recognised that even the children who had sat quietly during the whole class Tales Toolkit story have been listening and paying attention. We recognised that every child has the capacity to tell a story in some way – even the child who finds talking a barrier and remains silent throughout the day.

So far we have had one whole class session where we used our bags to source resources from around the setting. Following on from this, I mentioned to my class that I was going to take our new small bag outside to find objects to make a story. Several children wanted to play with me as well so we got wrapped up warm and off we went.

Using the phrase ‘I wonder what we can use as a character’, the children set off looking around. A few brought back recognisable toys we have outside but one girl brought back a leaf. I made the remark that we hadn’t used a leaf as a character before and suggested that we could draw faces and make up names (thinking about that all important mark making element!) This led the several other girls all drawing faces on their leaves. A couple of my boys then came over and wanted to join in.

Once the leaves became characters, we talked about what the setting for the leaves may be. We had a suggestion of the grass on the field. We then went to pick up some grass using our hands and fingers (strengthening finger muscles and palm arches!)

Thinking about a problem brought two ideas; stones and a beanbag. We decided to use stones as the problem. We started to craft a story as you can see in the last image.

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