Story Sparks for Young Storytellers
LAUNCHING DECEMBER 2026
FOR CHILDREN 4+ YEARS • CHILD-LED STORYTELLING
Designed to guide children as they begin telling their own bedtime stories.
New Developmental Sparks also open the door to real-life topics such as friendship, confidence, empathy, sharing, honesty, teamwork and problem-solving, giving families a natural way to explore big ideas through imaginative stories.
• More than 1,000 story combinations
• Designed for children aged 4+
• Child-led, with adult support when needed
• Builds storytelling confidence and sequencing skills
• Encourages creative thinking and conversation
PRE-ORDER SHIPPING
Australia: ships from 15 November 2026
USA: ships from 10 December 2026
From Mark Cunich, creator of the original Story Sparks.
Story Sparks for Young Storytellers
How It Works
Turn the pages to create your own unique combination of Character, Location and Scenario. Each section includes three child-friendly questions designed to help young storytellers develop their ideas and decide where their story goes next.
In the below example, you can start a story about a unicorn at a campsite who is working in a team.
Characters
Who is your character? What are they like? What might they want, think or do?
Setting
Where does the story happen? What might your character see, hear or discover there?
Scenarios
Something happens. What does your character do about it? And most importantly, what happens next?
Introducing Developmental Sparks
Stories are a wonderful place for children to explore things they are beginning to encounter in real life. Developmental Sparks are woven into Young Storytellers to open up ideas around friendship, confidence, empathy, sharing, honesty, teamwork, feelings and problem solving.
Rather than telling children what to think, the prompts give them room to imagine situations, make choices and talk about what their characters might do.
What the experts say
Playful, inspiring and beautifully structured, this is a wonderful resource for developing children’s language, literacy and storytelling confidence. My students now beg to create stories every day.
— Reading and Education Specialist & Author, Dr Victoria E. Waller, Ed.D.
What a creative approach to collaborative storytelling! Story Sparks will empower young children to create their own fun stories, building self-regulation skills, empathy and connection as they do so.
— Developmental Psychologist, Professor Catherine McMahon
Which book should I start with?
If your child is 4 or older, Story Sparks for Young Storytellers is the best place to start. It is designed to help children build their storytelling skills, develop ideas, sequence events and take a more active role in creating stories of their own.
If bedtime storytelling is completely new to your family, the original Story Sparks is also a wonderful way to begin. It helps parents establish a fun nightly storytelling tradition, with the adult leading the story while children join in with suggestions, choices and funny ideas.
Many families will get the most from using both books together. Start with the original to build the routine and confidence around storytelling, then use For Young Storytellers to help your child take the next step from joining in to leading the story themselves.
Try It Out
Click and drag to swipe between a combination of Characters + Locations +Scenarios to see what fabulous story you can come up with
About the Author
When Mark Cunich’s first child was born, he became a stay-at-home dad with aspirations of telling imaginative bedtime stories. He quickly discovered, however, that exhaustion and creativity don’t always go particularly well together. By the end of the day, finding another character, adventure or vaguely interesting plot could feel impossible. So he began creating Story Sparks, a simple way to make bedtime storytelling easier, more imaginative and more fun.
As a child, Mark had struggled with reading himself, and storytime could sometimes feel more like a battle than something to look forward to. He wanted Story Sparks to take away some of that pressure and create a space where reading ability didn’t matter. Instead, adults and children could simply enjoy stories together, contributing ideas, being silly and discovering where their shared imagination might take them.
Since the release of the original Story Sparks, Mark has visited schools across Australia and told more than 100 stories with children of different ages. Along the way, he has learnt an enormous amount from the unexpected ideas, questions and directions children bring to a story. Just as importantly, nightly storytelling has remained part of his own family routine. As his son has grown older, Mark has watched him progress from listening and offering suggestions to developing characters, solving problems and increasingly taking control of the story himself.
That progression became the inspiration for Story Sparks for Young Storytellers. Drawing on years of storytelling with his son, his experiences in schools, and feedback from parents, educators and psychologists, Mark developed the second book to help children make that same transition from participating in a story to beginning to lead one of their own.
Before becoming an author, Mark worked as an accountant, a profession that didn’t offer many opportunities to exercise his imagination. Creating Story Sparks helped him rediscover a creativity he wasn’t sure he had, while also revealing just how creative children can be when they are given the opportunity.
Today, bedtime storytelling remains a treasured part of his family’s routine, and the two Story Sparks books reflect the journey Mark and his son have taken together.