Restaurant/Rory’s Story Cube Smashup

If you have ever been to a restaurant that has a piece of white butcher paper covering the tables with crayons?  It’s a nice way to pass the time as you wait for your food, especially for kids.

I’ve been planning back to school activities and I thought it would be fun to cover the tables in my classroom with white butcher paper one morning and put out crayons. The students could draw anything. I want opportunities that allow me to see their interests. Kids tend to draw things they love. I can walk around and ask them about their pictures and get to know them better.

I also like open-ended experiences that focus on collaboration and creativity.  When I thought of covering the tables with paper, for some reason Rory’s Story Cubes came to my mind.

Rory’s Story Cubes are a fun set of dice with pictures. You roll the dice and then have to create a story by connecting all the random pictures on top of the dice. These usually create fun stories and it’s interesting to see how a person makes all the pictures work to create one story.

Here is an example of a roll using Rory’s Story Cubes:

So this is where the smashup begins!  The students will not know that they are going to have to create a story about  their pictures so it will automatically create random pictures. After you allow students time to draw pictures, tell them that their group needs to create a story from the pictures on their paper.  I have a set of Rory’s Story Cubes so I plan on modeling how to tie all the pictures together.Many students  have not played with them. If you don’t have a set of cubes, you can use the picture above to model the activity.

Things I am thinking about:

I’m wondering if I should make a grid on the paper and tell them they can draw an object in each box. This might make it easier to tell the story and be more like playing Rory’s Story Cubes.   

What do you think? Do you think kids will like it?