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Tales Toolkit

Interactive, child-led storytelling training and resources for impact across the early years.

Award winning Tales Toolkit provides interactive, child led resources for early years using symbols representing story structure. Resources give children independence to create stories around interests using anything to hand! Provided with online training and on-going support. Proven to impact language, creativity, literacy, social skills, problem solving and close the gender gap in literacy.

Spotlight 2022
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Overview

Web presence

2014

Established

63K

Children

20

Countries
Target group
Teachers
Updated
May 2024
'Tales Toolkit is now part of our culture. It permeates everything we do... conflict and resolution, experimentation with new ideas and concepts, dealing with everyday problems and situations!' (Early Years Lead, Primary School). Tales Toolkit wants above all to give every child a voice, and provide a platform for expression both collaboratively and individually to make happy, creative learners.

About the innovation

What is Tales Toolkit

Story is a super powerful learning gizmo. Created by teachers, Tales Toolkit is a Toolkit for creating Tales.

Our interactive, open ended, child led resources for early years use easy to remember symbols for Character, Setting, Problem, Solution giving children a tool to independently create and write magical tales.

Resources come with online training for schools and on-going support to ensure maximum impact is made across many areas of learning.

Families can join in too, creating tales together at home. During the Coronavirus pandemic, a Tales Toolkit parent website was created to support home learning, free to all families of member schools.

Check out the benefits

The littlest of people have the biggest potential. Tales Toolkit makes a difference where it matters, early on, setting children up for later success. Read on for some of the benefits of using Tales Toolkit.

Tales Toolkit proven to impact

• Social & emotional skills

• Language and communication

• Literacy

• Creativity

• Boy writing

And lots more!

Read the full research report from Goldsmiths University of London.

Few more reasons why Tales Toolkit is great

• Fun for both children and staff

• Little or no planning for teachers

• Involves children at different levels and needs

• Adapts to fit with your community, curriculum and children’s interests

• Easy to use

• Team building, everyone trains together


Just a few testimonials, we have lots more!

'All staff have embraced Tales Toolkit with enthusiasm and we’re reaping the benefits from our equally enthusiastic children. Our children are talking more, confidently telling creative stories, as well as engaging in mark making earlier than we usually see it.'
Headteacher

"Tales Toolkit offers a framework for supporting children’s first steps in making up stories . We recommend Tales Toolkit to other schools in our teaching school alliance. We think it’s a really powerful approach to boosting communication and imaginative play and we’re very comfortable with how it fits in with our overall early year’s ethos." Dr Julian Grenier.

'A real strength is the quality of the training materials which bring together a wealth of sound practice in an accessible and supportive format which you can watch again and again, and we have! Definitely one of the best resources we have bought this year.'
Headteacher

'A resource that enables children to articulate the stories that matter to them is definitely worth having. Tales Toolkit is such a resource, giving children a simple but highly effective means of exploring, creating and telling the stories that are important to them.
'
Alistair Bryce Clegg (Author, blogger, Global speaker and inspirer of teachers)

Impact & scalability

Impact & Scalability

Storytelling is a powerful tool to develop social and emotional learning by verbalizing one’s feelings, understanding others perspectives and creating spaces of empathy while nurturing the use of imagination and creativity. Tales Toolkit is an excellent education innovation that promotes social and emotional learning through structured, well-designed and
easy-to-use materials.

HundrED Academy Reviews

This innovation uses storytelling, which is a universal fixture in life. By using innovative, child-led storytelling, it can be integrated into any program, anywhere. This also allows for the stories to naturally adapt to the context.

This is an innovation in education! The toolkit seems simple, the training for educators, effective although online, and the storytelling powerful to develop SELs skills such as problem solving, cooperation, communication… while based on context

- Academy member
Academy review results
Impact
Scalability
Exceptional
High
Moderate
Limited
Insufficient
Exceptional
High
Moderate
Limited
Insufficient
Read more about our selection process

Implementation steps

Sign up and Start Training
Schools, early years settings and other learning centres can sign up for a Tales Toolkit membership and receive access to our online training. There are five training videos, each about 50 minutes long, and they are designed to be completed by a whole staff team. So, grab an hour, pop the kettle on, get the biscuits, print off the handouts and get ready for some fun, interactive storytelling training.
Receive Resources and Put Training into Practice
Your resource pack will then arrive in the post. This include big story bags, smaller story bags for portable stories, aprons for outdoor and mobile storytelling, hangers, books and more. Once you've watched the first training video, you can start putting Tales Toolkit into practice. The training is designed to be embedded gradually, leaving weeks between each session so the whole course can take up to four or five months to complete.
Finish Training and Embed Across Practice
Once you've done all five sessions, congrats! You're a superstar story guru! You can take any old bits and bobs lying around the provision and build castles and dragons, heroes and villains, plucking them out of thin air! You can also use Tales Toolkit in conflict resolution and real-world problem solving across the provision. Once you've embedded Tales Toolkit in your practice, sessions don't even need preparation. Just pick up the bags and go. And keep an eye out for our regular webinars!

Spread of the innovation

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