Winter tales and Spring stories
activities in school with Creeping Toad
December 2015 - April 2016
marking the changing edge of the year, here are old stories, new
adventures, art, history and wildlife to inspire your classes
this year we might meet….
- storytelling, and storymaking, treasures, plots, landscapes and thrills
- puppets, lanterns, shadows and pop-ups
- trees, leaves, nuts and fruit
- animals in winter, waking into spring
- ancient lives, distant land
With stories running from the frozen edges of the world right
through to the first flowers of spring and the waking of the bumblebees, here
are stories and activities to enchant and inspire.
I am planning and promoting workshops for the winter and spring ahead. Here are ideas, suggestions and throw -away thoughts: all of these are here as starting points. If you are interested in a session in school - or some other place - your youth group perhaps? or as a public event in a library, museum, country park or dungeon, get int ouch! let's have a chat! Let's plan something wild and wonderful!
A day of activity might include:
~ storytelling performances: lasting
up to 60 minutes for up to 90 children at a time
~ stories out of anything! usually we might do this outside but
given wintry weather, we'll use leaves and pine cones, twigs and stones and
shells indoors to
inspire words, create poems and shape a set of stories never told before (allow
60 minutes for a class session)
~ story and book workshops: taking a bit longer (allow 90 minutes for a class) as well as
discovering those stories no-one has ever heard before, now we will build those
into the books that no-one has ever read before and leave the classroom with a
library no-one has ever visited before!
~ pop-up storyscapes: allow an hour for a class: gathering
ideas, images and words we’ll make quick 3-d landscapes holding
the essence of a story or the thrills of a lifecycle in a setting, with
characters and the words that set the adventure running
~ Winter lights: finding words and
images to hold the essence of winter or the hopes of spring in quick poems,
we'll slide words and pictures
into lanterns and make a swarm of small glowing lanterns to glow through the
darkest nights or gloomiest days
~ shadow stories: out of my stories might come new stories: drawing on whatever theme we
are working with to create quick performances of shadow puppets. Incorporating
silhouettes, translucence and transparency, we'll mix science with story to
create an (almost) instant set of story performances to show or perhaps to film
~ Ancient Lives and other lands: add
a voice from the distant past to your history topics with stories that our
Stone Age ancestors might have listened to. Stories. models, artefacts and
drawings can feed into art inspired by cave paintings, carvings and jewellery.
Similar inspiration runs through collections of African, Rain Forest and Native
American material
~ Animals in winter - getting to
know your local wildlife from stories to listen to, to models to make,
life-cycles, food, homes and habitats
~ Trees? Just how well do you know
your trees? Help your class become Tree Detectives and identify local trees
through leaves, seeds and twigs. Find out about animal life in different trees
and meet some of the old stories that have grown alongside our oak, ash, holly
and birch
~ Working with younger children:
special sessions for early years where we might listen to stories, invent new
stories, find adventures in gardens, make puppet characters to send on
quests…enjoy playing with words…
~ your own themes and ideas: or are
you exploring a particular theme that you would like to involve some stories
in? pirates….tropical islands….ancient Greeks…the wonder of fossils and rocks…..where in our
school would bears live?…a shadow puppet quidditch match
and the Great Fire of
London have all featured in recent
Creeping Toad projects
Charges: £250 a
day: includes storyteller’s fee, travel and materials. Can be
paid on the day or I can invoice you. Activities can be adapted to suit
groups from KS 1, 2 or 3
For
further information:
visit the Creeping Toad website at Creeping Toad
(www.creepingtoad.com) or the blog at
creepingtoad.blogspot.co.uk
To book: contact Gordon directly at
or by
telephone:
landline: 01298 77964
mobile: 07791 096857
you never know who - or what -
will end up in a Creeping Toad story!
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| inspired cave drawing |
