The Magnet Board

One day my daughter asked can we put pictures on a board and make them stick and move them around and tell a story. I didn't quite understand what she meant but after some more discussion I realized she was talking about something like a flannelboard that they had at church.

I thought a flannelboard sounded like a good idea for teaching Bible stories so off to the teacher supply store we went. The prices on the flannelboard stuff was a little (actually a lot) more than I was wanting to spend that day, but we came across some large punch out pictures of people and scenes from the New Testament. We took those home and stuck magnet strips on the back.

We have a nice size magnet board to tell Bible stories using these cut outs, anything from the birth of Jesus, to miracles performed by Jesus, to the resurrection. There are pictures of people Jesus healed as well as pictures of his followers and of the religious leaders. I might tell a story and then later have the kids retell it with the pictures. Or when we are with a group of kids, like during our Bible study night with friends and their kids, we might let the kids each have a character in hand and they listen for their part in the story and place it on the magnet board.

On other days we use our imagination and make up stories about people in general and transform these pictures into anything we want. Then we can make more magnets to go into our stories – cut out pictures of animals or things from magazines, glue them on cardstock for extra strength and add a magnet on the back, or put magnets on the back of family pictures.

We have also made other games/activities on our magnet board. We have magnetic letters, as well as magnetic words (a lot of which is left over from my days of teaching ESL). We have cut up craft foam into various shapes, added magnets on the back, and then made a picture with those shapes. We have glued a picture to cardstock and then cut it up, adding magnets to the back of each small piece, thus making a magnet puzzle.

One game my daughter likes to play is to put a bunch of things on the magnet board. We look at it for a minute and then close our eyes. While we are not looking, she will take something off. Then we have to look at it again and figure out what item is missing. I know they play this game at church, to reinforce what characters were all in the story or to remember some other detail like that.

We have a lot of fun with our magnet board. I think felt or flannelboards are great too for story-telling, but the magnet board lends to flexibility because for less than a dollar's worth of magnetic strips, it is easy to turn anything into a magnet!