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| treasures to unpack, stories to unfold |
Spring stories,
summer tales 2025
Stories in school and other excitements with Creeping Toad,
and ideas for public events!
celebrating the richness of the changing year, here are stories, puppet-making story-building, pop-up landscapes and boxes of treasures. Outdoors or indoors, the natural world will give us stories and offer inspiration for child-led creativity!
Important dates:
World Book Day 6th March 2025- booked but other dates that week are available
On tour in northern Scotland:
- 18th - 27th March 2025
- 28th April - 9th May 2025
other days, other dates, other places!
With stories spinning from the first signs of spring through earth giants and thunder-tigers to summer flowers, here are stories and activities to enchant and inspire.
Gordon MacLellan – Creeping Toad – is one of Britain’s leading environmental art and education workers. Take a look at the Toadblog: Creeping Toad
Drawing on 30 years of professional experience, Gordon’s work blends environmental experience with creativity. “Much of my work uses storytelling and story making but I also make small masks, giant masks, flags, lanterns, pop-up landscapes and create wild and wonderful occasions. We might work outdoors and take ideas from the world around us and our discoveries there. Indoors herds of model mammoths combine with boxes of treasures to give children material to work from”A day’s visit to your school - or a public event in a library, museum, the park at the end of the road, might include:
storytelling performances: lasting up to 60 minutes for up to 90 children at a time stories out of anything! outdoors or in, we'll use leaves and pine cones, twigs and stones and shells to inspire words, create poems and shape a set of stories never told before (allow 60 minutes for a class session)
NEW WORKSHOP: tools for writing
Taking natural objects, we'll build characters, use landscapes to describe journeys and reveal issues, problems or maybe terrible crimes. This workshop will give children ideas and tools for building stronger imagery into their writing and confidence to experiment and be adventurous with their writing. Most Creeping Toad sessions create stories but this is more focussed on literacy skills
puppets: we can make quick finger puppet animals or adventurers and create instant stories...or we might play with light, colour and shape and create an instant shadow puppet show or make rod and ribbon puppets to wander across a classroom....
from across lands and times: I can select stories to suit times and places: so we have had days of Native American stories, or Egyptian or Greek or Roman, there have been Chinese tales and African animal stories….lots of exciting resources to draw on here, to make new writing vibrant and lively. Castles are popular, too, with boxes of treasures to inspire a new adventure and release a bold princess or courageous dragon
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!
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!
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| long, low, meandering river pop-up |
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 in a setting, key characters and the words that set the adventure running
tales of old Scotland: a collection of stories of Highland folklore and Scottish histories, of heroes and sorrows, bravery and the magics of sea, mountain and moor. These can be steered in various directions and we might listen to stories from Viking days or medieval and Stuart stories and even add some Scottish explorers and their adventures and disasters…
your own themes and ideas: or are you exploring a particular theme that you would like to involve some stories in? In recent projects, we have also made talking stone puppets, a giant eagle to hang from a classroom ceiling, prehistoric rockpools, a swarm of shadow dragons, pop-up castles
Charges: £280 a day (if you are a long way from my base in Buxton, Derbyshire, that price might need to increase a little
Fee 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 P1 through to Secondary
For further information: visit the Creeping Toad website at
To book:
contact Gordon directly at
or by telephone: mobile: 07791 096857
slightly wild "prehistoric mouse"
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