Book Week workshops

Friends in Nature

celebrating Book Week Scotland

from beetles and bumblebees to birds, bats and bears, exploring friendship with the world around us!

Toad availability for these workshops: 19 - 26th November 2025

DATES STILL AVAILABLE: 19, 21, 25 November

(Book Week: 17 - 23rd November 2025)

 

Making friends,

Becoming friends,

How do we nurture a friendship?

What do friendships give us?

 

Book Week Scotland is an annual celebration of books and reading. This year's Book Week theme is “Friends”,and while this post is about Creeping Toad Book Week plans, these same ideas and activities could be brought to other places! So if you are in darkest Derbyshire, hair-raising Herts, spontaneous Sussex or some such place, get in touch and we’ll see what we can do!

Creeping Toad has done Book Week related activities for the last couple of years and since Toad activity usually revolves around the environment, we’ve been thinking about workshops exploring friendships with the world around us and how those ideas, principles or the friendships themselves might inspire some writing and book-building! In planning for this year’s adventures, we’ve been working with our friends at N4H: 

Nature 4 Health aims to help people connect with nature, each other and themselves. Experience the mindful benefits of green and blue space and the fascinating species we share the planet with. (N4H website)

favourite animals, 

helpful beasts, 

being pals with unlikely creatures, 

long, slow friendships with trees, 

how to make friends with a river…

befriend a toadstool?

Toad sessions could include 

• storytelling
• storymaking
• turning stories into our own little Books so we build books in Book Week
• making puppets to dramatise our stories
• shadow puppets might make for even more striking storytelling
• pop-up landscapes could build stories into forms that encourage words without worrying about writing!

To book, to find out more or to pitch in with your own suggestions contact Gordon:

Mobile: 07791096857

Email: creepingtoad@btinternet.com

 

Build your own library

Make your own books

build a library for your classroom!

Workshops for National Book Week, 

13 – 19^th November 2023

 

(These workshops were planned for Scotland's National Book Week and I am delivering workshops in Scotland from 14 – 23^rd November but am entirely happy to take bookings for other places and other times!)

 CONTACT: Gordon at creepingtoad@btinternet.com

book building, print making, rubbing, sketching

Make a library for your classroom, your den, your secret corner or visitor centre!

 

Let's start with a story from some ancient manuscript! There might be ancient Egyptian myths first written on papyrus or Sumerian legends etched in cuneiform scripts on clay tablets. We might recite Viking runes that were carved into stones. We might simply tell tales from old, old books.

 

concertina pages

We’ll start with stories but then we will open our own books. And design our own pages….in these workshops every child (or other participant! I'm not worried about your ages!) will have the chance to make their own book. We may not have time to complete the stories that go in them in the time we have, but we’ll plan, design, cut and make so that by the time we finish, there will be books inviting new words to fill them!

 

Depending upon time and desire, there are different book forms we could use:

·      One-piece books: fold, fold again, cut a door, cut a window, unfold, open the door and there – a house! A castle! A tree to hold a story together

·      Concertinas: small, neat, folded and unfolding books: ideal for drawings, small prints, adding maps and tiny pop-up characters in corners

·      Bound with book rings: here individual pages are held together with metal hoops giving us opportunities to play with different papers and textures, with foldout pages, pockets, flaps, transparent pages and more

·      Georgian secret books: historic “love letters”- folded booklets with flaps revealing and concealing endearments or, for us, hiding or uncovering parts of a story. Traditionally wrapped in paper and sealed with wax, we’ll give our booklets covers and use the sealing wax as a brand on the cover 

 

Georgian folded letters of secrets

Age: workshops can be adjusted to suit ages but we could talk about what would suit your own groups best, 

Time: most workshops need 90 minutes or so with a class of about 30 children

Bookings: talk to me about possible dates and costs: creepingtoad@btinternet.com

How about a book building session for National Poetry Day (5th October 2023), World Book Day (7th March 2024), National Storytelling Week (Jan 30th - Feb 6th 2024), - or just because it would inspire the folk you work with!

Book rings let us play with different shapes and sizes of pages