Story is a super powerful learning gizmo. Tales Toolkit is an interactive, child-led resource featuring easy to remember symbols representing story structure: ‘Character,’ ‘Setting,’ ‘Problem’ ‘Solution.’ Early years children create stories around interests using anything to hand: favourite toy, conker, picture of Grandma…you name it!
Practitioners complete online training and implement what they’ve learnt with physical kits, and pretty soon the whole class is letting their imagination run wild!
Children have their voices heard, learn to play and play to learn; teachers facilitate low-planning, high-impact storytelling sessions and parental involvement.
Winners of awards from Teach First, UnLtd, Nursery World, Teach Early Years, Education Resources Awards and featured in HundrED & LEGO Foundation Spotlight on Social and Emotional Learning.
With over 250 schools globally, and an impact report from Goldsmiths University of London showing a difference made to many areas and characteristics of learning. Tales Toolkit has become a recognised tool in the push for more holistic, playful, child-led learning for many practitioners and experts.
Tales Toolkit helps develop communication skills; confidence; innovative thinking; creative problem solving; self-regulation and executive function through a scaffolded learning approach. It also lays the foundations for successful engagement with language for later learning.
Story is a super powerful learning gizmo. Tales Toolkit is an interactive, child-led resource featuring easy to remember symbols representing story structure: ‘Character,’ ‘Setting,’ ‘Problem’ ‘Solution.’ Early years children create stories around interests using anything to hand: favourite toy, conker, picture of Grandma…you name it!
Practitioners complete online training and implement what they’ve learnt with physical kits, and pretty soon the whole class is letting their imagination run wild!
Children have their voices heard, learn to play and play to learn; teachers facilitate low-planning, high-impact storytelling sessions and parental involvement.
Winners of awards from Teach First, UnLtd, Nursery World, Teach Early Years, Education Resources Awards and featured in HundrED & LEGO Foundation Spotlight on Social and Emotional Learning.
With over 250 schools globally, and an impact report from Goldsmiths University of London showing a difference made to many areas and characteristics of learning. Tales Toolkit has become a recognised tool in the push for more holistic, playful, child-led learning for many practitioners and experts.
Tales Toolkit helps develop communication skills; confidence; innovative thinking; creative problem solving; self-regulation and executive function through a scaffolded learning approach. It also lays the foundations for successful engagement with language for later learning.
We have loved this project. The children loved creating their own stories. The awareness of story structures improved and they developed some lovely vocabulary. It continues to support our love of storytelling at the Whitley.
The Whitley Group’s Tales Tool kit Action Plan
Tales Tool kits will be used by the Early Years Unit at Whitley Memorial CofE Primary School. Our Unit includes children who are Nursery and Reception age. The project is supported by and will be used by the teachers and teaching assistants in the Unit. This group of early year’s professionals will take part in the training programme and implement the kit within our setting.
We plan to start the training in September 2022 and the programme will be up and running as soon as we have accessed the training. We plan to have weekly sessions with all children. Extra funding will enable us to purchase the resources we need to ensure that all children will have access to the tool kit within the continuous provision time and in small group activities.
Our school priority is to increase our children’s vocabulary development and awareness of the structure of stories. We start each half term with a story and a lot of our work comes from these books. Our vision is that the Tool kit will support our Communication and Language priorities throughout the early years in so many ways. The main impact will be to encourage lots of talk and the creation of their own stories. This will lead to increased vocabulary development for all the children in our Unit.