National Storytelling Week: Celebrate with Busy Things
National Storytelling Week (NSW) runs from 29th January to 5th February this year. It has the theme ‘Your Story – My Story’.
To celebrate the week and the art of storytelling, we’ve updated our popular Traditional Tales suite of activities. All five stories – Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, The Gingerbread Man, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and The Three Little Pigs – are now new and improved, so have a look today! Now widescreen, they have slicker controls, better animation and the videos have captions you can choose to display or hide. They also have index markers so you can locate the section of the story you want without scrolling all the way through!
Traditional Tales Upgrade for National Storytelling Week
Access the activities all by typing “Traditional Tales” into the Search teacher tool on the welcome page, or if you know which tale you’d like to focus on, simply search the title.
In this blog, we’ll be focusing on The Three Little Pigs so you can see the full extent of the activity and the games linked to it. The same activities and games are available for each of the five tales.
The Three Little Pigs: The Movie
Watch Cat and Dog perform The Three Little Pigs. With speech and text, the children can follow the words as the narrator tells the story. You can pause on specific sentences to discuss them, and rewind/fast forward as much as you need to ensure the class is following fully.
What’s Next and Sequencing
‘The Three Little Pigs: Sequencing’ Activity 
‘The Three Little Pigs: What’s next?’ Activity
Check your pupils’ understanding of the story with these two great, interactive games. What’s Next asks your pupils to simply identify which scene followed first, whilst Sequencing requires your pupils to specify the order in which three events from the story occurred.
Printables
The suite of activities also includes offline projects focused on the story. For The Three Little Pigs, this includes colouring sheets, a picture sequencing activity, a cut-out scene to create and finger puppets, so that the children can re-enact the story themselves!
General Activities
In addition to the above, our Traditional Tales area includes some activities that span all the stories. ‘Dressing up box’ is one of the most popular. You can choose the items of clothing you want Cat and Dog to wear at the wave of a wand, swap between story and more standard clothes, and add titles and speech. The roll-over phoneme audio clips even allow you to work on your sound talking and spelling!
Custom Projects
Last but not least, why not create a custom project for your pupils, so that they can write or draw about the story? You could even assign the ‘My favourite book’ or ‘Design a book jacket’ activity to them to complete!
We hope you enjoy the new versions of the tales and put them into good use this National Storytelling Week! If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it, so please do get in touch!
Don’t have access to Busy Things during National Storytelling Week?
To see the activities that we’re suggesting for National Storytelling Week, you’ll need to sign up for a 28-day free trial here. It’s very quick to organise, completely free and without obligation to subscribe.
If you need help finding things, we’d be happy to show you around. Simply join one of our free Zoom tutorials and we’ll give you a tour.