Sensory play is an important part of children's development. A space designed for sensory interactions can help to encourage children to explore all their senses for storytelling. Roma and Rachel discuss and demonstrate how to make sensory spaces for telling stories at home or in any play setting. They use familiar and everyday materials such as blankets, cardboard boxes, tables, and clothes pegs. Well, it is time to get ready to build a fort, ship, puppet theatre, or reading nook to start your very own adventure. Have Fun!
To turn on English subtitles click the ‘subtitle’ button on YouTube clip.
Story Props
We have fun creative arts and craft activities to accompany the Sensory Story Spaces. A visual list of useful things, a guide on how to make sensory stepping stones which are fun for walkers and crawlers. For Shadow Play we have provided templates of puppets for you to print and cut and finally ideas on how to make story cards from your child's drawings.
Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.
Dr. David Elkind
Child psychologist, educator, speaker, and author
Learn more ...
A collection of links to resources for lots more Arts and Craft activities, ideas on making and using puppets for storytelling and where to find great affordable materials in the UK.
Beverly Puppet Festival Activities
This is one of the best accessible, child-friendly resources we found for making puppets. If you enjoyed playing with the shadow puppets, you are in for a treat. This video library has 21 step-by-step puppet activities to download and excellent videos made by artists and performers. From sock puppets to flying bird mobiles. A priceless resource for parents, teachers, and anyone fascinated by puppetry.
Art. Play. Children. Learning.
For more sensory art activities for children check out Louisa Penfold's blog for parents that aims to make art fun and meaningful for kids. It features ideas for how parents can cultivate children’s creativity at home. The blog is divided into 5 sections -Kids' art activities, Family excursion ideas, Tips for parents and teachers, Amazing artists and educators, and Academic research.
Scrapstores in the UK
The scrapstores are a good community resource for affordable materials and can be found throughout the UK. The network supports the reuse of unwanted resources, clean reusable scrap materials (which businesses find hard to recycle so would otherwise be landfilled) are available for children to play. The link takes you a map of a scrapstore near you.
Schemas or children's play patterns
Children's play patterns are seen when children repeatedly carry out the same actions. There are many schemas that they can experience at the same time. Understanding and noticing them can help you design more child-centred activities. We use them to design and extend the interactivity in our installations. The link is to ParentZone Scotland's webpage for videos and documents on schematic play.
Artists Biographies
Roma Patel and Rachel Ramchurn are the founder of Makers of Imaginary Worlds. They are both passionate and inspired by making work with and for children.
Roma is a scenographer and digital artist. She has designed interactive and site-specific performance, theatre and digital installations in the UK and Europe since 2000. Her recent PhD research at the University of Nottingham focused on the points of intersection between scenography and interactive technologies in Theatre for Early Years.
Rachel began her artistic career in 2000, involving participatory methods to inspire chainsaw sculpture. She has spent over 15 years as a freelance artist creating and exhibiting works of art in public spaces and delivering social engagement workshops to families and children in and around the North West.
You can find more about the both artists here ....
This not a Box! It is a...
