Telling stories with children: story stones, story dice and story tiles

Give a child a picture and ask what happens next, and a story starts. Story stones, story dice and story tiles all work this way: a picture comes out, and the child decides where the story goes. Here is how each one is played, how storytelling helps young children learn, and how we make The Story Path, our own oak story tiles.

Three ways to tell a story with pieces

Story stones. Smooth stones, each with a picture on it: a fox, a house, a key. A child picks a few, lays them out, and tells a story that links them. They're a familiar sight in nurseries and reception classes, often kept in a basket and passed around a circle.

Story dice. Dice with a picture on every face. Roll them, and the pictures that land face up become the story. The roll does the choosing, so every story is different.

Story tiles. Flat pictures laid one after another, so the story has an order you can see. The Story Path is a set of story tiles in solid oak: each tile has an arrow joint, so it locks onto the next, and the story lies on the floor as a path, from a first page with the child's name on it to a last one that reads The End.

How The Story Path is played

Every set comes in a cotton drawstring bag, which is also the pile you draw from.

• The Lucky Bag. Draw a tile without looking, join it to the path, and say what happens there. Then draw the next.
• The Forked Path. Draw two tiles and choose between them. The one you leave goes back in the bag for another day.
• Round the circle. In a group, pass the bag along. Each child draws a tile, joins it on and adds the next line, and the path keeps the whole story to read back at the end.

When it's time, The End joins on and brings everyone home.

Storytelling and the early years

Storytelling sits right at the heart of the Early Years Foundation Stage, the framework that early years settings and reception classes in England follow from birth to five. Telling stories out loud is how young children build vocabulary, put their thoughts into full sentences, and learn to listen and answer back.

The Story Path helps children practise:

• Making up stories of their own, and changing them as they go: a new one every time the bag comes out.
• Retelling a story in their own words, by walking back along the path from the first page to The End.
• Talking in full sentences about what happened, what's happening now and what might happen next.
• Listening and answering back, when a grown-up asks "and then what?"
• Taking turns, passing the bag and adding to someone else's story.
• Imagining and choosing, at every fork in the path.

It works as well at home on the living-room floor as it does on the carpet at nursery.

The game, and the floor

The Story Path has a version you can play on our website. A child types their name, draws tiles from a bag on the screen, and their story is read back with their name in it. The government's screen time guidance for under 5s suggests about an hour a day for two to five year olds. A story in the game is four tiles long, so it fits easily inside that.

The game is the way in. On the screen, we write the lines. On the floor, the story is theirs: they draw an oak tile, look at the picture, and decide what happens next, in their own words.

The magic tiles, and the gold

Some tiles are cut from rarer woods: purpleheart, padauk, tigerwood and zebrano, a new one each week in November. On each magic tile, the path, the stars and the thing the tile is named after (the moon, the golden egg, the wishing star, the crown) are gilded by hand with genuine 24ct hand-beaten gold leaf, laid on a food-safe, child-safe size straight onto the wood, with nothing over it. The size is the thin layer that holds the leaf to the wood. Under the gold there is only the wood, and over it there is nothing at all.

Each magic tile stays on sale after it arrives, so they can be ordered together.

How it's made

Tap for sound

Every tile starts as a plank of solid oak. We plane it, seal it with shellac and engrave the picture. Then it is ebonised with iron and vinegar, a reaction with the tannin in the oak that turns only the engraved lines black, and finished with Osmo hardwax oil. Each tile is 120 mm square and 13.5 mm thick, and the arrow joint is cut so that any tile joins any other, in any order. Every piece is made to order in our Wiltshire workshop.

Where to start

• The Story Path starter set, with their name: their name on the first page, four tiles and The End.
• The starter set, no name: the first page reads "Once upon a time…", for classrooms, nurseries and families with more than one storyteller.
• The first book set: their name, two tiles and The End, for a first birthday or a first Christmas.
• The tiles and packs: twelve places the path can lead, from the little dragon to the pool, and four packs of three.

Posted from 1 December, in time for Christmas.

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