Aim of the game:
Books and stories play an important role in both language and literacy development. Research shows that good oral narrative skills (spoken story telling skills) are essential for children to develop written narrative skills. In order to tell stories, children need to understand a sequence of events and be able to describe them as a beginning, middle and end. This fun Sequence Stories activity will help you to support your child with these skills.
What you will need:
A set of pictures of someone or something carrying out a sequence of events. These can be photographs, hand drawn pictures or pictures downloaded from the internet. We recommend starting off with a simple 3 step sequence – so you’ll need 3 pictures.
- Brushing teeth (open toothpaste – put on the brush – brush teeth)
- Eating an apple (whole apple – one bite taken out – apple core)
- Going out (putting coats on inside – opening door – stood outside with coats on)
- Getting dressed (putting socks on – putting jumper on – fully dressed)
- Making a snowman (rolling a ball of snow – half finished snowman – finished snowman)
How to play:
- Introduce the game to your child by telling them you’ve got some pictures and you need their help putting them in the right order.
- Mix up the pictures and put them face down on the table or you put them in a bag and let your child pick them out one at a time.
- Help your child to sequence the pictures from left to right in the correct order by talking about what they can see. This is an opportunity to model time related words such as first, then, last or beginning, middle and end.
- Once you are both happy that they are in the correct sequence, help your child to tell the story of what is happening. If your child struggles with constructing a sentence or linking them together don’t worry, they’re learning a new skill and this will improve over time. Simply repeat back what they are saying making any corrections or expand on what they have said so they hear a rich and complete model to learn from. Below is an example of how you might do this:
Your child says “get toothpaste….on brush….brush teeth”
So you could say “yes, well done first you open the toothpaste, then you squeeze it onto your brush and then you brush your teeth”
How to extend:
- If your child finds putting a 3 part sequence together too hard at first then just choose 2 part sequences and gradually build up to 3.
- If your child excels at 3 part sequences then use 4 part sequences.
- Extend the activity by asking ‘what might happen next?’ once they’ve told the story. You could add a picture with a question mark after the last sequencing card to represent this visually.
- Take photos of your child carrying out activities for them to sequence and recall together.
- Once your child gets really good then turn over the cards so they are face down on the table and see if they can tell the story sequence from memory.