When our littlest ones are very little, we seem to collect a great amount of board books. They are the best for those tiny hands with their impossible to tear pages, beautiful drawings and simple story lines. Today I want to show you that even at this stage, you can start expanding your regular storytelling with props and invite little ones to use their language and imagination to add their own voice to the story. See how we changed things up with this jungle book story basket.

What’s in the Jungle Book Story Basket?

Well, you may have seen our other story baskets (like the Goodnight Gorilla, Old MacDonald and Hattie Peck one) which can be used for both reading and building small worlds. They are filled with a great variation of items and are very exciting.

This jungle book story basket is truly aimed at the littlest ones and intentionally kept simple. The younger children are, the less amount of stuff they need to play. Little brains need time and space to process and keeping play sweet and simple helps them concentrate, focus and learn.

So for this story basket, we simply stuck with the absolute basics:

• a jungle themed board book
• jungle animals
• jungle greenery of some sort (a green pipe cleaner will do!)
• a basket (or tray in this case)

Simple, simpler, simplest.

How to Play with your Jungle Book Story Basket?

There are a number of ways in which you can play with your child or invite them to play with and explore a story basket on their own:

• you can read to story out loud and ask them to find and name the animals, it’s great fun if you get it wrong occasionally
• you can set the story basket out as a quiet time invitation to play and explore and see what happens
• make some jungle noises!

Or simply play and see what happens, any time spent with your toddler is time well spent.

Story Baskets and Creativity

Story baskets are a very simple and extremely rewarding way to get more out of your favourite story book. They are open ended and it really depends on your child, their ages, stages, interests and so much more as to how they’ll interact with the story basket. There’s no right or wrong.

The thing to remember is that in play children learn, grow, process, explore, develop and basically just do what they need to at that time. As parents, teachers or caregivers we can only try and assess where they’re at and provide them with the right kind of invitations at the right time. Some days we get it right and some days we get it wrong.

Luckily our toddler and preschool crowd are a very forgiving bunch and usually up for some fun play time. When you’re all played out with the story baskets, do have a look at these other (12!) creative ways to tell a story. It’s a popular article I wrote with about 60 links to amazingly creative book based activities. All the inspiration you need in one happy place.

Have fun!

Ann*

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