Create a Goldilocks sensory storytelling basket using small toys and items from around the house, for preschoolers and school aged kids to re-tell the story in their own words! A brilliant early years resource for telling this traditional tale together in a sensory-rich, hands on way.
Following on in our new series of Sensory Storytelling Baskets for toddlers to school age children, we created a Goldilocks basket as this is one of the girls’ all time favourite stories (and for many small children around the world too, no doubt!)
As I mentioned before, we have a huge amount of teeny tiny toys from various Sylvanian Families, Playmobil and dolls house sets accrued over the years, which we keep in one large, underbed storage box for constant rummaging and small world play set ups! This makes creating these types of baskets quite straightforward as we often have what we need to hand, and it’s easy to create the missing items. A good place to find these is in second-hand shops and in bundles from eBay.
Again, we discussed what we might need for the basket first, and then spent some time together searching for everything we needed. This was a good way to talk about the main characters, sequence of events and key props that are mentioned in the story.
Into this basket we placed:
3 different chairs
3 different sized beds
a table
3 little dishes
3 knitted bear finger-puppets
1 wooden doll’s house figure
(These finger puppets are similar and a gorgeous set to give as a gift!)
a cotton ball
a small dish of dry porridge oats
a copy of one of favourite, rhyming versions of Goldilocks. It’s SO fun to read aloud and has flaps to lift on each page too!
This one is quite hard to find at the moment, so I’m including a link to another favourite version too, which also has flaps to lift and great illustrations!
Then we read the story together and as we did so, the girls found the correct items to match each part of the story.
They then took it in turns to re-tell the whole story by themselves, using all of the story props to help them remember the sequence of events.
They loved having real porridge oats to serve out onto the little dishes and we talked about how it changes consistency once it is cooked. It would be a great progression activity to go on and make some porridge with the children and then see how it smells, feels and tastes too!
The cotton ball was for feeling the softness of Mother Bear’s bed and chair, and they placed these on top of the items as the story progressed.
Once play was over, we popped the items back into the basket and left it out for free access and storytelling over the future weeks. We will replace it with another favourite story soon (or find some more baskets and keep this one intact on the shelf!)
These would be fantastic in a nursery, preschool and Reception/ Kindergarten classroom (or indeed in a little reading corner at home too) to encourage free storytelling at any time.
What they are learning while they play:
Creativity: using their imagination and props to create stories
Literacy: retelling a familiar tale from memory using story props, telling a story in the right order following the main sequence of events, using storybook language to retell stories, understanding words such as “character” when learning about storytelling
Physical: feeling soft and hard and comparing the two
Maths: counting 3 items reliably, comparing and ordering 2 or more objects by size
See our PLAYFUL LITERACY archives for dozens more ideas!
You might like our GOLDILOCKS STORYTELLING activity too!
And how about making some PORRIDGE OATS PLAY DOUGH to enhance the play!
[This post contains Amazon affiliate links for your convenience.]
