Developed in partnership with Education Services Australia

The Australian Curriculum sets the goal for what all students should learn as they progress through their school life. Skills in the Year 1-2 curriculum include:

• understanding that images can add extra information to words in a text
• matching photographs with captions and text with pictures from a story.

It’s easy to help your child practise these skills as part of everyday life – just use these simple ideas.

Bring the story to life

Looking for a way to have fun while developing your child’s ability to use images to tell or enhance a story? Play a game! 

There are lots of commercial games around these ideas, but it's easy to make up your own too. Here are three ideas to get you started.

• What’s that? – choose a word from a book or dictionary and draw a picture of it for the other players to guess. Drawing skills don’t matter. This is a great game for seeing how one word can be represented in different ways, and one image can represent many different words.
• Crazy Captions – find family photos or magazine pictures and invent crazy captions. Encourage your child to use clues in the picture to make up details such as where, how or why something is happening, or what the people in the picture are saying.
• Crazy People – find pictures of people in magazines and invent crazy names and life stories for them. Try to base the story on clues in the picture, such as where they are or what they are wearing.

Just remember to keep the turns moving, the rules simple, and the focus on fun!

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