Children have their own private oral cultures, you'll find sayings and nonsense rhymes chanted, sung and muttered in playgrounds as part of clapping and skipping games, taunts and retorts, and when choosing who is going to be 'it' for a game of tag.

Collect and create narratives from real life stories and reminiscences from home.

Collect riddles, wise sayings, wishing lore, good luck/bad luck superstitions, proverbs, lullabies and nonsense sayings.

Research local legends, ghost stories and the stories that lie behind place names that are connected with your local area

Create a joke bench in the playground (schools with friendship benches could change the purpose of this area for a short period of time, you never know, the idea might stick and it might well serve the same purpose).

A class tells the gist of a longer story back to the teacher to help commit it to memory in the correct sequence.

Children swap stories in pairs.

In pairs, children help each other to 'Jam Load' a story into memory by gabbling it against the clock.

Retell a story tripling words with synonyms or other appropriate nouns, verbs, adverbs, or adjectives.

Create story tapes of stories for other people (perhaps as a midwinter gift for a grandparent).

Ask pupils to revisit the story by story-boarding it.

Create a storycloth with story imagery out of sequence, which requires a storyteller to interpret.

Children devise ways to tell stories in groups.

Create a sequence of 3D story boxes to illustrate a story.

Create videos of a retelling of one or more stories by an entire class.

Make a map of the world of the story.

Put a character from a story on trial.

Create 3D shrines in honour of characters within a story.

Decorate a room and dress for a banquet in a story.

Create a museum of artifacts from stories children have heard.

Paint a picture in spoken words, of a favourite moment from a story.

Ask pairs, small groups or individuals to select a different scene from a story they have been working with and describe it in detail. (This continues the idea of Picture a Scene very neatly.) They then need to recreate these frozen scenes for others to see using any art technique they like: painting, drawing, montage, collage etc.

Children could also dress up, create a set, get into role and make their scene into a tableau, which can then be photographed.

Once all the scenes are completed, then they can be displayed in sequence to illustrate the entire story visually.

To debate and graph the ups and downs of fate and fortunes within a story.

Use a box of objects as a basis for making up stories.

Make up a story in a circle one sentence at a time.

Challenge children to say (and then make their own) tongue twisters

Compose bold epithets for characters.

Create stories based on local place names.