Parents, keep those story ideas flowing with Rory’s Story Cubes [App Store Classics]

Reading stories to your kids is such a pleasure. Making up stories is even more fun because your kids can star in them. My daughter loves nothing more than giving me a couple of topics and kicking back as I tell her a story which incorporates them. The only problem is that being a parent you’re often so tired you can’t even string a sentence together, let alone invent an engaging tale, and that’s why I was so excited when a friend of mine with three kids showed me a great app called Rory’s Story Cubes (iTunes link).

Rory’s Story Cubes is brought to you by The Creativity Hub, a company based in Belfast, Ireland, who also make award winning physical versions of the story cubes. But hang on – what are these cubes anyway?

On launching the app you are presented with nine cubes with different symbols on each face. Give your iPhone a good old shake to jumble them up and then tell a story based on what you see. You can rearrange and rotate the cubes, lock the screen when you’ve got a good selection after a shake, and export the screen to your photo library. That’s it!

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It’s such a simple idea. You and your child can take it in turns to tell the story by taking a symbol each one after the other, hand your iPhone to them and see what they come up with, or simply do all the work yourself while your child makes sure you haven’t missed any symbols. If you have kids this app is genius. It encourages parents to spend time with their children being creative and honing their language skills, and it’s fun for the adults to let their creative side out too. It may have been on the app store since 2009 but good ideas never go out of date.