Storytelling with Rory's Story Cubes

This year, I purchased boxes and boxes of

Rory's Story Cubes

as Christmas presents for the school age children I see for therapy.

Overall, these Story Cubes are one of my favorite tools for listening and spoken therapy for both children with auditory processing needs and those with hearing loss. It’s compact, durable, and has a wide range of applications. I haven’t done research into the designer, but it almost feels like this was a game designed by a speech therapist or special education teacher. Here are a few targets that are can be your hidden agenda while playing one of the suggested games variations described on the box.

http://www.storycubes.com

Targets:

Listening Skills – When used as a group game, the relatively small size of the pictures means that it’s hard for a student who wasn’t listening to just look at what his or her neighbor did and guess in order to continue the story or add ideas

Problem Solving – Interestingly, this skill is called out on the game’s packaging. Trying to fit nine seemingly unrelated objects or actions into the same theme or story is a problem-solving skill that’s appropriate for children and encourages creativity.

Item Identification – Most of the icons in the game are easily identified, and if they’re not, that provides an excellent opportunity to make a series of educated guesses.

Expressive Language – With dice that depict nouns and dice that depict verbs, you have the two most basic components of a sentence – an excellent scaffold for all forms of expressive language development.

Use of conjunction and transition words - Here is a free printable list from my colleague at ConstantlySpeaking.com. Print a copy and have it handy when telling stories.

Remember to model these words when telling your stories and then you child will listen and incorporate conjunction and transition words in their storytelling.