Valentine's Story Basket

One of my MOST favorite reading activities to do with young children are story baskets.  Story baskets are designed to attract young children to literature and enable them to become hands-on with a story.   Children retell the story, page by page, as they interact with the objects in the basket.  

I decided to make a Valentine surprise for my former students:  A Valentine's Story Basket.  Their current teacher is my friend and I know they will love using the story basket in their library center during the month of February.  

Making a story basket is lots of fun and it's easy to do:)

Start out by choosing a story.  I bought Celebrating Valentine's Day by Kimberly Roark at Lakeshore.  Then, as I was shopping at Target I found objects for the story basket. The Dollar Store is also a GREAT place to shop for story basket objects.

        This book and other easy readers with holiday themes also available online at Creative Teaching Press (CTP).  

You can use a real basket or another container to encourage children to explore the story basket.  I found this colorful bucket and thought the students would enjoy it.

Here are the objects I bought so that the pages come to life as students retell the story after listening to the teacher read it.

My plan is to laminate the hearts and encourage the children to write names of their own friends on the front of the valentines.  So, I must add dry eraser markers and index cards with the names of all the students to the story basket.  

Many objects for story baskets you will already have at home or in your classroom (like this doll).  

All finished!!  Hope they like it.

If you have any experience with story baskets, please post what stories have worked best for you.