The "Improv" story - storytelling, imagination and fun

One of the fun ways we spend time with our kids is by creating a story with them.

The activity is very simple. One of us starts a story with one sentence and then each one in turn, has to add a sentence to that story.

This process usually ends up with some amazing stories and lots of laughter among us and the kids. Lot of creativity and imagination come into play.

To make it successful, the trick is for grownups to say very descriptive sentences so that it makes it easy for the younger children to participate.

For example, instead of saying "Sanjay was walking in the fields", say "Sanjay was walking among the fields of sunflower while watching the yellow-orange sky of the sunset". This given the children multiple things to focus on - Sanjay, fields, sunflower, colour of the sky, sunset etc.,

Children usually provide shorter but very creative followups. If you use a long description, atleast one of those objects in your sentence will excite their imagination and let them provide a followup.  For example, some of the followup sentences were "Sanjay was wearing a blue shirt", "Sanjay was thinking about dinner", to "The sunflowers were more yellow than the sun" etc.,

A recent creation from our kids:

• Grownup: Ameer was a boy who lived in Chennai next to the blue ocean which had lots of boats and fish
• Kid1: Ameer liked the ocean.
• Kid2: He wanted to go on a boat.
• Grownup: So he walked up to the shore early one morning and asked the fishermen who were pushing their boats into the water, if he could come along with them to fish
• Kid1: They said yes and Ameer got into the motor boat
• Kid2: They went very far into the ocean

And after this the story went on for a long time with Ameer catching a fish bigger than the boat, and having to send it back to the ocean and how he and the fish talked and how a big wave came and pushed him back home etc., etc.,

We adopted this because our older one kept telling us to read more and more and more books and we thought we could get him into the process of creating a story also.

We call this activity the "improv" story. Improv (short for improvisation) is a well known art form.