🔥 Step 3: Bring Mental Images to Life
Bring mental images to life and construct stories in motion
💡 Objectives: After learning to feel, memorize, animate, and combine sensations, children will now create an inner movie.
They will structure their own mental images, transform them freely, and describe what they saw, heard, and felt.
👦🏻 Target age: 6–12 years
⏰ Duration: 5 to 15 minutes per session
📌 We have learned to associate different sensations and enrich mental images. Now it’s time for invention: each child can bring their mental images to life like a small inner movie, rich in sounds, movements, and emotions.
🟢 Exercise 1. Imagine and structure a mental movie
💡 Objective: Guide a mental scene, then let the child imagine what happens next, with movement, sound, textures, and surprises.
📌 The facilitator provides a short guided visualization. Then children are invited to freely continue their scene in their mind.
Some examples:
👁 See
The branch stretches and carries the doll.
The paper moves, comes alive, calls the child.
👂 Hear
The bell sings, rings, creaks, transforms into a voice.
🤲 Touch
The fan becomes giant and creates a storm.
The ground becomes spongy, sticky, slippery…
👅 Taste
Chocolate becomes spicy, frothy, alive…
Food laughs, cracks, dances in the mouth.
👃 Smell
The perfume flows on the skin, changes color, becomes a scented river.
A smell transforms into a colored mist.
🎭 Kinesthesia
With each breath, the body grows or shrinks.
The belly becomes a balloon, the back becomes a mountain.
💬 Sharing time:
After each visualization, invite children to share their experiences:
What did you see? Hear? Feel? It is essential to encourage listening and remind them to describe what they actually perceived before imagining extensions from an idea.
🟢 Exercise 2. Tell and share your “mental movie”
💡 Objective: Children freely invent a moving scene, with sounds, textures, colors, and can tell it as a story. They become creators of their own “mental movie.”
📌 Take a previously experienced sensory exercise (paper, fan, bell…)
Ask each child to invent their own transformation of this image
- What does this object become?
- What does it do?
- What happens around it?
💬 The child can add
- Movement (falling, flying, transforming)
- Sound (sound effects, voices, music)
- Changes in texture, color, shape
- A place or a character that appears
📣 Oral sharing
Invite children to tell their “mini-movie” aloud if they wish. Active listening, kindness, and freedom of form are essential. Encourage free and unexpected transformations.
Note: Staying seated helps children remain focused on their inner sensations without shifting to action or theatrical expression.
🌟 Conclusion
By animating their mental images, children develop a spontaneous desire to tell stories. They move from sensation to story, from feeling to construction.
This process also supports cross-disciplinary skills: in mathematics, for example, it enhances the ability to visualize a situation, order steps, and imagine transformations in space or time.
Telling a story here is already structuring one’s thinking.