Story Sparks - Ignite your bedtime storytelling!
Over 12,000 copies sold worldwide. 4.8 Stars on Goodreads
For children 2-8 years old. Adult-led storytelling
Over 1,000 plot combinations to ignite your creative bedtime storytelling!
- Makes bedtime storytelling fun and easy
- Increases language skills & comprehension
- Strengthens focus and recall
- Unforgettable bonding with children
Story Sparks - Ignite your bedtime storytelling! By Australian Author - Mark Cunich. Illustrations by Claudia Talarico ISBN 9781922810625
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Story Sparks - Ignite your bedtime storytelling!
How It Works
Turn the pages to create your own unique combination of Character, Location and Scenario.
In the below example, you can start a story about a pirate at a playground who is lost.
The book includes prompts that can help you if you get stuck.
Characters
Interesting and entertaining characters like this laughing pirate will take you on a great adventure
Locations
Locations like this park are familiar and relatable, making the perfect place to start a story
Scenarios
Fun scenarios like getting lost, will provide interesting plot lines to start your bedtime story
Who is this book for?
Story Sparks is designed to help families start a bedtime storytelling tradition from as young as 2 years old, turning stories into a fun nightly routine you can share together. It gives grown-ups an easy way to create imaginative bedtime stories without having to invent everything from scratch, while young children can join in with simple suggestions, choices and funny ideas as their confidence grows.
No reading ability is required. You tell the story and your child joins the adventure.
What comes next?
When your child starts wanting to take over the story, Story Sparks for Young Storytellers is designed to help them do exactly that.
Designed for children 4+, it builds on the original Story Sparks format with structured questions that help children begin creating and leading stories of their own. With relatable characters and Developmental Sparks to incorporate life lessons into stories, this is the perfect next step in your storytelling journey.
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.
