Burning red fireweed

Global Warriors

Fallibroome Creativity Week, 2019

Crab masks taking shape

At the Beach

storymap and puppets

Have you walked on the sand?

Pink sand and seaweed,

Yellow sand and

Red ribbonweed.

There is red coral under the waves

And rocks and

Light green, square jellyfish.

There are

Pufferfish here

And bubbles,

Giant blue fish

And sharks.

There are

Stones here and shells 

and smiling jellyfish.

There is red fireweed here.

It burns

From Gawsworth Primary School, Year 1

precise drawing!

Every February, Fallibroome Academy in Macclesfield coordinates a Creativity Week with the other schools of the multi-academy Fallibroome Trust. This year’s theme “Global Warriors” produced some wonderful work. At an evening of shared performances, there was a song written by children from all the schools skillfully weaving lines and chants from different schools into a single whole. There were dances, too, and some wonderful drumming, some telling drama and lots of delight. One school was riasing funds towards supporting an orang-utan orphanage in Malysia (hope I've got that right). Others were taking up pledges and working to reduce their own plastic footprints.

One of the strands within the Warriors theme was marine pollution, especially plastic pollution, which is where Creeping Toad came in….I spent a week wallowing in the despair of seas….or not quite. The impact of plastics on marine life set my groups off…..

a fish sees its fate in plastic

As a storyteller, I am often in an awkward situation with modern issues like pollution. There is little comparable in the story-record. Telling tales that have grown over centuries there is not much that directly addresses situations like a whale trapped in abandoned fishing nets. Yes, I know that the underlying principles of respect, connectedness and belonging always apply but that isn’t the point here!

So, as we went through the week, I told old stories and we listened for new stories and tried one school’s stories on the next one I worked with….

"The orca and the angel fish"

We heard about the ray that swallowed a plastic bottle thinking its shining shape was an ailing fish and the rescue attempts that followed by its friend a dolphin and the Doctor Lobster and sometimes by a child with courageous fingers and a long reach.

We recoiled from the misadventures of the school visit to a litter-strewn beach.

We encountered the Genius Fish who was finding ways of processing plastic so fish could use it.

We met the whales who were simply flipping rubbish onto the decks or preferably the heads of passengers of ships who were passing.

We made puppets.

Drew storylandscapes of marine worlds.

Made an unfolding sea.

Created ecologies of plastic creatures.

We had fun.

we entered freshwater - aoxlotl hats!

This post sets out to catch my activities. There will be other posts from individual schools and rumour has it an instagram post from Fallibroome of the Global Warriors song performance which I will add as links as I find them….

a scrap coral reef

Meanwhile, many thanks to all the artists, welcoming teachers 

and enthusiastic schools of the Fallibroome family