The guys behind this website where you can create a story for kids haven’t forgotten their childhood. Some of us might have. When I came across this online place for children’s stories, I was pleasantly taken back to my wonder years.
The television wasn’t all over the place as it is now. Stories narrated by elders had an aura of their own. Of course, the comics and story books were omnipresent.
The stories worked on a fertile mind and I usually ended up placing myself as the central figure in all of them. I was one of the five in the Famous Five adventures, I bumbled through the Amazon with Snowy and Captain Haddock and it was me that flew across faster than a speeding bullet. Haven’t we all played with our imagination?
Story Something (beta) is a website which doesn’t deny our young ones that “˜adrenalin rush’.
The tagline for this children’s website reads ““ for the hero in all of us. So first, Story Something is an online destination for personalized and customized children’s stories.
Second, it takes mental numbness out of the equation when your child asks you to tell a tale. You don’t have to scratch your head and jog your grey cells to remember a nice well timed story. Story Something has a whole kingdom full of ideas to create a story for kids.
Well, nothing’s new so far. Hold on before you turn the page.
Third (and more importantly), Story Something lets you personalize the stories in its story bank by changing the names of the characters to your near and dear ones. Enter your child’s (or children) name and the names get substituted for the one that’s in the story.
Similarly, you can put anyone you want in place of the other principal characters.
So the child who is listening to the story becomes the central character (the hero or the heroine) and the entire adventure plays out with him in the lead.
The stories come in two styles ““
Some are the normal types where you substitute the names and the story flows from the beginning to the end.
The second type is where the child (or you, the storyteller) can choose between two outcomes. These are longer and more interactive. The choice between the two paths directs the story to further adventures with more choices in the next pages.
Selecting the stories which you want to occupy your kid with is so easy with the stories arranged around the male or female characters, themes from adventure to sports and finally by age groups (2 years to 10 years).
You can read aloud the stories from the screen (though that does something to the image of pillow reading before sleeping) or better, take a printout and read it from there. Right now in the beta phase, the site promises to email stories only once a week.
Personalizing the stories is simple fun. The storytelling is better for it. It doesn’t take a psychology PhD to understand that a child can learn and absorb better with familiar names and characters. The harried parent also doesn’t have to come up with a new story each day.
Whether you are the storyteller or you hand the site over to your kid, Story Something gives something to fill the minutes with wide-eyed wonder. What does the parent in you say about a web tool like Story Something?
