Coconut shells for hooves, cellophane for fire, rice in a jar for rain. Write a short play, record it with the sound effects live, and play it back at dinner.
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My kids are shy about performing in front of people but will happily do anything into a microphone, which is how we ended up making radio plays.
The sound effects are what hook them. Once they discovered that squeezing a packet of cellophane sounds exactly like fire, they wanted a fire in every single story.
We play the recordings back at dinner. The grandparents get sent them. It has become a proper little tradition.
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Lay every sound-maker out on the floor and spend ten minutes just trying them. No story yet - this is the fun part.
Write down which object makes which sound. Rice equals rain. Coconuts equal horse. Cellophane equals fire.
Write a very short story together - five or six lines is plenty. Ours are always about a lost animal.
Read it through and mark every place a sound belongs with a highlighter. Those are the cues.
Assign jobs: one narrator, one or two voices, one sound-effects person. Swap after every take.
Hang a blanket behind the recorder to soften the room echo, and do one practice run without recording.
Record it in one take, mistakes included. The laughing at a wrong sound effect is the best part of the tape.
Play it back at dinner, then record a second version with the sounds exaggerated and see which everyone prefers.
Keep the first script to under ten lines. Long scripts get abandoned halfway through and the recording never happens. Record close to the sound-makers and further from the voices, or the rain drowns out the story.
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