Sirius radio’s Kids Place Live is a favorite, and it also introduced us to THE STORY PIRATES! They play them every Saturday at 1:00. Storypirates is a group of actors based out of New York that turn stories written by children across the country into awesome sketches and songs for the radio. The best and most endearing part is that all of the stories are in the words of the child author.
I recently just started using the story pirates for some of the kiddos on my caseload that encounter difficulty with language narratives, vocabulary and reading comprehension. Specifically kids who encounter difficulty with gestalt processing (a.k.a “the main idea” and “details”).

I couple the Story Pirates with a Mindwing Concepts curriculum called Braidy Story Grammar Marker. This curriculum provides the kids with a multisensory experience to the complex structure and language of story telling/language narratives.

It’s summer and the kids are out of school, a perfect time for unleashing their creative outlets. The kiddos that I work with have loved diving into the creative writing process using these two tools. I have seen kids who were completely at a loss for words and in great panic, enough to shut them down completely when given the task to write a picture to summarize the story they just heard or read. It was breaking my heart that kids as young as kindergarten were so disheartened at the writing and reading process.

Introduction to Multisensory instruction using the Brady Story Grammar Marker program provided these struggling kids with the essential tools for reading comprehension and creative writing. The Story Pirates provided these kids with the encouragement and hope for endless possibilities to use their imagination.

I’m amazed at some of the stories that have been created both in individual sessions and dyadic` or small group sessions. There have been stories that take place in Australia including a Kangaroo who loses his home and mom to a sharknado but endures through a journey finding new friends, a snow man who loses his body parts and puts them back together again while living on a sunny island, and a sloth named Oliver who switches places with a cheetah named Mia on the cliffs of a Venezuelan island.

The best part is getting your families involved. Parents are encouraged to be hands-off and let the creative process evolve, but they are the ones who are responsible for submitting the story to the story pirates. They are also the source that enables their children to listen to the story pirates, inadvertently strengthening their auditory processing and listening skills.

The kids who experience the summer empowering their creative and gestalt processing skills return to school both refreshed and confident. Share the experience wit your families and schools, you won’t regret one minute of it!