If you liked my Question Matrix blog post (the most popular blog post I’ve written) then you’ll appreciate this one too!

Inspired by Rory’s Story Cubes and a desire to check for student understanding in a variety of ways, I created my own #healthed story cubes and used them at the end of last semester.

9 cubes, 6 sides on each cube meant I had to identify 54 words to represent on the cubes. I chose verbs, emotions, topics and ‘other’ icons. Icons were chosen to represent words such as:

Comprehend, promote, prevent, analyze, demonstrate, access, communicate, enhance, avoid, reduce, practice, happy, sad, confused, gender, relationships, bullying, online, advocacy, goals, mental health, social health, emotional health, physical health, nutrition, hydration, sleep, muscles, reproductive health, media.

I printed out a template and pasted the icons on to the template. The template can be found at tinyurl.com/healthdice. You can print these out, or switch out the icons if you wish. After careful cutting, scoring and glueing you will have 9 cardboard cubes.

You can now use these in a variety of ways in class.

1: Roll all 9 cubes. Choose an image to start your story/narrative and then continue, linking each of the 9 face up images.

2: Think of a health theme or topic. Roll the 9 cubes and try to weave them into the chosen title or theme.

3: Divide the cubes between a group of students. First player rolls the cube to start the story/narrative. The next player in the group rolls their cube and builds upon the story. You can stop after 9 rolls, or keep the rotation going if the students can confidently continue with the activity.

Here’s one example of how this looked/sounded in my class. It’s definitely a work in progress, but given a few attempts the stories improved and were more health literate.

https://x.com/carmelhealth/status/809827946034790400?s=20

Why not get students to suggest other icons, or create their own cube as an extension activity? If you use this idea, or the question matrix activity in class, I’d love to hear how it went. Did you adapt it to suit the needs of your students? Did you improve upon it?

Since originally posting this I have created story spinners. They are easier to cut out and create than the story cubes. Download yours at http://www.bit.ly/storyspinners