Books are excellent for sparking your children’s imagination. When your child loves a story and its characters, there are many simple and enjoyable creative activities that can help your child to develop a variety of skills and bring the book to life.
Here are three creative follow-up activities you can use with any book, and are suitable for children of different ages and reading levels.
Illustrate the story
After reading a picture book, encourage your child to create their own illustrations for the story. They can use crayons, markers, or even create digital illustrations using a computer or iPad.
This activity helps to build your child’s creativity and comprehension skills, as they think about how to visually represent the characters and events in the story.
Create a storyboard
Another fun activity is to create a storyboard for the book. This can be as simple as drawing a series of boxes on a piece of paper, or using a digital storyboard app or website.
As you work together to create the storyboard, you can talk about the characters, plot, and themes of the book, helping your child to build their creative and critical thinking skills.
Make a book trailer
For a more creative and tech-savvy activity, you and your child can create a “book trailer” for the book you just read. This can be as simple as filming a short video on your phone in which you and your child summarise the story and give your “review” of the book.
Or, you can get more creative and film a series of scenes that act out key moments from the story. You can even build scenes using Lego and move the characters to make a short animation.
This activity helps to build your child’s storytelling skills and creativity, as well as giving them a sense of ownership over the book.