Narrative Therapy – Where

This is the third post in our series on narrative therapy. If you haven’t read the others you might want to go and have a quick look first! Read the introduction here and ideas for teaching who here. Helen did mention that the order you work through the questions may alter between younger and older children. When I work through Narrative with junior aged children, I tend to teach:-

When, Who, Where – as setting the scene or the beginning,

Problem/Solution (what happened) as the middle

The end – as the end!

This then ties in with the terminology used in literacy. But with younger children (3-7), once you have worked through who – being an animal or person, or Mrs. Gunner’s special word – ‘character’ (brownie points for any child that can remember my special word!!), we move on to where. This means a place or somewhere we go. I reinforce with both the written word and the Makaton sign.

In the same way we played games to practise who, we do the same with where and you can also link the two together. Here are some of my favourites and there are more listed in the Black Sheep Press narrative packs.

• I start with pictures of places e.g. a school, a beach, a house, a park etc. and encourage the children to name ‘where’ the place is.  You can also work in a little ‘who’ comparison by asking who has been to a park etc.
• When the children are good at naming pictures of places, you could encourage them to generate places from memory.  When I did this during this year’s narrative groups it was always Legoland and Peppa Pig World being suggested!!
• Another great way to work in vocabulary is by having a beach vs snow categorisation task.  I do this with pictures for support.  Ask the children to name the item of clothing and then think about ‘where’ they would need it e.g. flip flops at the beach, scarf in the snow.  I always like to give a few wrong answers to check if the children are listening!
• Where do I need it?  You need a feely bag and a selection of objects e.g. tooth brush, pencil etc. and the children can take it in turns to pull an object out of the feely bag.  They have to name the item and say where you would need/ use it.
• You can ask where questions for the children to answer.  Where do you live? (This is often tricky and I advise that you find out first!), Where would you find a doctor? Where would you go to get food?
• My favourite book for support where is ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’. This has lots of different locations and great descriptive language – the narrow, gloomy cave and a big dark forest.  It also has repetitive language so the children can join in.
• You can also link your who’s and where’s. There are a couple of great resources in the Black Sheep Packs.  One I use all the time is a farm/ seaside/ zoo categorisation task. So the child names the ‘who’ and then says ‘where’ it lives.  This can often provoke some great discussions about where animals live!  There are also a few pages with who pictures on one side and where’s on the other side and you have to link them up.

With the older children I tend to concentrate more on improving descriptions. Many of them can think of a school or a house if asked to generate a where, but we try and extend this to the huge school or the run down house. If we are feeling very ambitious, we might get to a scary, run down house on the edge of town!!

• Generating where’s. With the older children, I often ask them where they have been on holiday or where they would like to go.  You can get out maps or atlases and look at different countries – an easy way to tie in with geography!  I also like to work on some shop vocabulary here.  Nowadays, when you can buy everything in a supermarket, children tend to be less familiar with words like butcher and baker.
• Use pictures of places and encourage the children to describe them.  As above this is a great way to work on adjectives. There are some great worksheets for this in the Black Sheep Packs if your children need visual support and a bit more help generating adjectives.
• Listening for words that tell you where.  This is from the Black Sheep Packs.  You read the children a sentence and they have to find the where.  I find this type of word identification really useful.  For example “Our cat always sits under the chair” or “The scary monster roared and ran into the dark cave”

Do you have any other ideas you use to teach where? Read the next post in this series – when – click here!