Story Strip

ages 2-6

Supplies

Story book with 7-10 characters, strips of paper long enough to accommodate the story characters (large construction paper works well), drawing utensils or clip art options on computer.

Activity Detail

Use this activity to help build your child's memory skills and story-telling skills. Take simply drawn characters from your preschooler's favorite book (Very Busy Spider or Brown Bear, Brown Bear are good choices) and put them on a strip of accordion-folded paper. You can free-hand, trace, or find clip art on the computer. Each fold should contain the picture of one character. This activity can be done with just about any story that has multiple characters to help preschoolers remember character names and sequence. Older kids can even retell a story using their own words with this simple visual reminder. I used the book Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard. It is a delightful story where a vivid blue bird wakes up grumpy, and then his friends follow him through his grumpy walk and help bird out of his funk by the end of the story. My 2-year-old could name all of the character animals within a day, and my 4-year-old could retell the story in her own words. They each had a mini-sized version of the story in the palm of their hands!