Emily has recently been attending a course on active story making. This involves focusing on one story for a number of weeks so that the children begin to learn the structure of a story and how stories are told. We do this by using props and actions to share the story with the children and encouraging them to get involved. This term we are looking at the story of The Three Little Pigs. We use the repetition of three throughout the story to enable the children to join in with the words as well as the actions. We have also planned activities so that we are able to talk about the story together. On Wednesday we made playdough and used it to create brick houses for the pigs. We also explored making marks with the sticks and the pigs’ trotters in the dough. The use of tools in the dough and the actions of squeezing, stretching and squashing dough helps the children to develop their fine motor skills which prepares their muscles for the first stages of writing. 
