Tell Me a Story cards: illustrated cards that can be arranged into endless tales

By Cory Doctorow at 6:20 am Thursday, Dec 3

eeBoo's Tell Me a Story Creative Story Cards are boxes of 36 beautifully illustrated cards showing loosely connected scenes that your kids can make stories out of. The motifs on the cards repeat themselves -- characters and props recur -- so that there are many, many ways of joining them up into different tales. We have the circus set and my 21-month-old loves them, though she's just getting the hang of words and stories. But she likes to arrange them and then demand that I link them up with some kind of narrative, and then she plays with them on her own and talks a combination of nonsense and some recognizable words as she tells the story herself. It's a a really fun way to play together, and I like that you can lay out the stories in two dimensions, placing cards above, below, behind, before and on top of one antoher as the story progresses.

I bought the cards on impulse while I was on tour, thinking they'd make a nice present for Poesy when she got a little older, but they've become one of her favorites. This weekend, she grabbed the box and carried it over to me, shouting "Story! Story!" A hell of an endorsement.

Some alternatives, courtesy of my Twitterers: Once upon a Time: The Storytelling Card Game (for older kids) and DIY Children's Board Book from Instructables.

Tell Me a Story - Creative Story Cards