Rory's Story Cubes and spontaneous speaking.

This week I bought a set of Rory's Story Cubes. It is a story generating game. It contains of a set of 9 dice-sized cubes (19mm) with different images on them. They cost around £7. The box is sturdy and quite small and will easily fit in my jacket pocket.

To play, you simply throw the dice and invent a story based the 9 pictures you see. There are over 10 million possible combinations of images so even someone like me should not get bored with it.

I thought that they would be great for Languages as starter activities and vocabulary building exercises, particularly with my older and more able students. They need not use all nine dice, but a small group could play with two or three of them. They would be ideal for revising tenses, too.

If I included model answers and grade descriptors I could get my GCSE students to use them to improve their speaking and writing skills, too.

There is also a second set of cubes available, called "Actions", which contain pictures of different sports and activities. These would be ideal for my KS3 students for practising hobbies, opinions, tenses, etc

If I had both sets I could mix the two and get my students to produce some really good sentences.

Spontaneous speaking opportunities and fun at the same time.