Well I’ll be darned – we’re having our fourth nor’easter blizzard since the month of March began… which means another snow day from school. Cue up the storytelling fun with these two simple projects!

For this first version, I gathered some materials, including pretty paper cut into squares, stamps, and markers.

I showed Travis how to stamp a story and fill in the designs with markers to make a scene. You can plan carefully with a plotline in mind as you go, or just stamp randomly and see what story unfolds.

Our story was coming together!

Once we had filled enough pages, we added hole punches and laced them together. Hole punching was definitely Travis’s favorite part of the project.

Voila, your own little story book!

After I helped put together this first booklet, Travis got more involved with the second.

Don’t worry if your child stamps repeat images on the same page. The story doesn’t need to look perfect!

As he worked, he told me the plot that was unfolding, so I jotted it down.

He was so proud to see his own story take shape.

Next up we decided to try a new stencil pack as the basis for stories and scenes. We’ve never used stencils before, and now I am a convert; Travis did a fantastic job following around the lines. At first he only dared to try simple shapes like carrots and tomatoes…

…but soon he was proudly tackling complicated shapes like bugs and dinosaurs.

For each scene, we filled in the background or just colored them in.

For some of the scenes that I stenciled, Travis would tell me a caption, which I added in.

We ended up with some adorable “conversations.”

What are your go-to plans for a snow day? Please share in the comments!