Silly Bands Storytelling

Are your children quite literally up to their elbows in Silly Bands?  C and R have a bunch; I think they multiply while we are sleeping.  Anyway, C began using them for storytelling this week.  It was one of those proud mommy moments because it was all his idea and all I did was watch.  I thought I would share what he did so that you can try this with your kids.

He was inspired by the cowboy shaped bracelets from his collection.  He began by sorting them.

Then he drew a few pictures and added the bracelets to the completed drawings.

At this point, he invited me to listen to his story.  Here it is:

     First, the four cowboys got dressed.  Then they rode around on their horses.  They found a bull and they ran away.  Then they saw a bull fight.  The strongest bull won.  He got a trophy.


If your child is not inspired to create his or her own story revolving around Silly Bands, sit down with your child and a few of the bracelets and begin telling the story yourself.  Then encourage him to add something to the story, or even draw a picture to illustrate the story.

*I know that the brand name is actually "Silly Bandz".  As a former English teacher, it really bugs me when companies purposely spell words incorrectly.  

Unplugged project: Words

I have been reading Unplug Your Kids and following the unplugged projects of other people for a few months now, but this is our first time participating. My sister, the amazing children's librarian, gave us the idea for this project.




C and I read Max's Words by Kate Banks. We both enjoyed this book. Max has two brothers; one brother collects stamps and the other collects coins. Max wanted to collect something too, and decided to collect words. He cut words out of magazines and newspapers. Max realizes that it doesn't matter how his brothers' collections are arranged, but words can be arranged to create stories. Even his brothers want to create stories with Max's words. The illustrations in this book are great. For example, the word "hungry" has a bite taken out of it! Max's Words is already a favorite in our house.



So, we had to cut out some words of our own. I did most of the cutting because C is four and doesn't quite understand where one word ends and the next begins. I did not know this until we started cutting out words. It actually surprised me because he is reading small words and Bob books and I just assumed that he understood the relationship of words to sentences. I did read words to him and let him tell me which words to cut.








Then we worked together to write a story. We talked about how words make up sentences and sentences make up stories.





C's story: The Superhero got ready for great battling. A perfect idea came to him. He was going to fight the alligator monster. A green car smashed into the monster and flattened him like a pizza. "Excellent job," said the hero and he went on a fun Disney vacation.



The ideas for this story all came from C. I simply helped him arrange the words to create a story. I wrote in some words when we didn't have it in our pile.

C then used his stencils to illustrate his story.

This is the final product. We will definitely try this again. C enjoyed using the cut out words to create a story.

We will definitely participate in the Unplugged Project again too!