Storytelling with photography and drawing tools is one of my favourite imaginative play activities in my Reception class.

In our ‘Who lives in Castles?’ enquiry children used the outdoor area to build huge castle structures with large blocks on our climbing equipment. The small world characters they wanted to use to retell the story of Rapunzel didn’t cut it, they were too small for their castles. The castles were too fragile for real life role play and the bricks would fall to the floor.

After taking a photograph of their castle structure with the iPad camera, I taught the children how to tap ‘Edit’ and use the ‘…’ button to access the Markup tools. 3 simple steps to navigate from a photograph to a mark making activity.

Now the learners, on location with their castles, could draw stories about Rapunzel onto their images.

There’s something special when technology is part of the toy box. Children can create, talk and edit their ideas, moving freely between the physical and digital space (and back again).

Here are more examples of storytelling with photography or markup:

Runaway Food Stories

Story Planning with Small World

Story Writing with Photography

Learn more about taking photos, editing and using markup here.