StoryBox - The Perfect Magazine For Budding Storytellers

We’ve recently started a subscription to StoryBox, a storytelling magazine for children. It’s the ideal first magazine for families who don’t want their children inundated with branded characters and plastic toys.

With babies, tracking development is simple. There’s no missing that they’ve begun crawling, or walking, or talking, or moved on to solid foods. With older children though, the development can come as quickly, but it’s a little harder to see unless you’re paying close attention.

Recently, 5-year old Ameli’s reading has come on in leaps and bounds. In the space of two months she’s gone from spelling out three letter words, to writing text messages to her aunts and uncle on Whatsapp! Since she loves receiving mail, I thought a magazine subscription would be a lovely idea for her, and so I signed up for a couple of children’s books from magazine.co.uk.

The first one we received is the title StoryBox. I am honestly so impressed with this magazine. From the glossy thick-paper cover to the decent quality paper inside, this feels more like a book you’d keep in the shelves than a throwaway magazine.

Not only is the first story – about a pirate – almost like a regular kids story book, but then you get to go on to the educational pages – in this issue that’s on ‘why do we use suncream’ and some facts and information-in-story-form about sharks.

From there on there are cartoon strip style stories, and the best part of the book for my little story teller, the cartoon strips where you get to tell your own story to go with the pictures. That’s what she’s doing here:

Just as little brains tire from all the reading and story telling, there are a couple of pages of activities, like spot the difference, match the words to the character and so on. There aren’t a lot of games, but that’s not the point of this magazine, so it’s not a problem.

One of the main things I love about this magazine is that despite the obvious quality of it, there’s no advertising, except for two pages that promote the magazine. There’s no mainstream advertising, no products, no ~~must-have~~ really-don’t-need toys or anything else that makes me reluctant to buy off the shelf magazines normally.

More often than not, when I buy a magazine for the children, it ends up torn up into bits in no time, but though they’ve had two weeks with this magazine, it’s still in great condition, which leads me to believe they’re treating it more like a book than a magazine.

I am looking forward to having a shelf full of StoryBox magazine’s from magazine.co.uk, and can’t wait to see my small one grow into them too.

Click below for a walk through of the magazine if you want to see what the different stories in it look like:

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