Skulls, bones and stones

African wilds 

and ancient caves

hand axe

hyena tooth

Then there were bones and stones and teeth. Small hands carefully handling, turning over a flint axe, fresh flaked by James Dilley* in a wonder of precision, laying bone needles on a delicate palm, and wrapping a friend in reindeer hide**  and sitting him down with a wooden bowl and a stone knife and deciding that Stone Age school uniforms look more exciting than contemporary ones

Stone Age Days, Bone Detectives, an avalanche of ancient stories and excitable Reception children. “is it snowing rain or is it raining snow?” They posed the question (Colne-Primet Primary gets its pupils thinking!). None of us could answer it, but we mapped our adventure with snowflakes melting onto card, mud from the squelchy puddle, mud from the plant pots, mud from our boots, muddy wool from our gloves and the wind that whirled the rainy snow around the playground and the wind that threw the snowy rain full into our cold faces….This was a week that ended in snow but began in Africa - at least Africa in Chester with Overleigh St Mary’s Primary school and shaping stories, taking tales and retelling them, adding new detail and extra hyenas, or lions, or whales or sharks or crocodiles….

Buxton Junior School, slid into some stone age work with ease: telling us of their adventures with cave bears and wolves, unfolding Stone age Toolkits. With Bone Detetcives we became more analytical: asking questions, turning over mysterious skulls and trying to deduce their identities - or just lifestyles and challenging each other with our trickiest finds.

flint blade

Rewarding days and 450 children later at the weekend we found the Treasures of the peaks with the Knights of the Chapel. But that is another story.

a well-furnished cave with stone tools, fire platform and 

a cheerful family

* James Dilley: archaeologist and person of excitement! James will be back with Buxton Museum and Art Gallery in March for a weekend of Bronze Casting. if you would like more information on joining this workshop, drop me an email and i will send you information when details are finalised in the next few weeks: creepingtoad@btinternet.com


** relax, it was fake

New workshops for winter 2015

 

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

creepingtoad@btinternet.com

or by telephone:

landline: 01298 77964

mobile: 07791 096857

you never know who - or what - 

will end up in a Creeping Toad story!

inspired cave drawing

Ice Age life and adventures

Ice Age life in old Buxton

a workshop at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, 

29th July 2015

Evidence - but of what we're not sure!

With many thanks to all our artists and makers this morning - just over 100 people joined me and made puppets and pop-ups in a stampede of mammoths over two hours

There are activities every Wednesday through the summer holidays. Contact the Museum for more details - or look at this post for details o a couple of other ones...

A fox lurks in a cave: Fox Hole Cave on Wheeldon Hill perhaps - or maybe Reynards Cave in Dovedale where a hoard of Roman coins was found...

 The inhabitants of this cave kept increasing....the owl moved in unexpectedly... (see top of the page)

We were also making folded-card animals. Two cave bears....

A small boy and his camp-fire

 A beautiful cave by a river, under a steep, sharp hill

Some of our cave-people were a bit surprising....no-one was quite sure what the batmobile would have looked like, Ice-Age style, but we were sure Batman and Robin looked much the same. A Bat-sled with huskies perhaps?

 Unexpected inhabitants: a dragon!

An owl flies over the mouth of the cave, and an adventure begins...

Book reviews: Stone Age schooling

Stone Age books

more ave than Stone age but first ideas from a group looking at ancient life

Hands-on History: Stone Age, Charlotte Hurdman, Armadillo, 2014 978-1-84322-974-2

Stone Age, Bone Age! Mick Manning and Brita Granström, Franklin Watts, 978-1-4451-2892-4

O, if only! 

No, two books about the Stone Age - specifically about teaching "the Stone Ages" to children

Hands-on History is great: a rewarding mix of factual information and activities to try. The information is well presented and could be used by a teacher to get a bit of background or be given to confident KS2 readers for their own information. It is with the activities, however, where this book really scores. Most chapters have an activity associated with its content and while some are familiar - paint sprays to get hand prints - others are delightfully new and inventive. I really liked the mammoth bone house and the model canoe.

There is a bit of a dependance upon air-drying clay which might start pushing costs up if you were doing these activities with a class (substitute card?*). I like clay as a paper replacement: it offers a different texture and a sense of the issues of working on a different surface. Using clay to make model axes and fire-drills is fine but most children I work with would instantly want to try their new tool out and I don't think these would stand up to much heavy wood-cutting or fire-starting!

I love the generous confidence that assumes we all know what shape and size to make our model mammoth bones, and that we are all happy about instantly drawing cave pictures. A bit of guidance in these cases might have helped: maybe a quick column on looking at animals and finding simple shapes to build the main picture from?

The activity side of Hands-on is its greatest asset and is sadly lacking in Stone Age, Bone Age! Here a cheerful, almost rhyming, narrative bounces our young adventurers (KS1) through Stone Age life. Good bright pictures accompany a simple text where key points are supported by some background information. But I wanted some action: some definite suggestions for things to do….we could fill in the gaps ourselves but I think the book would have been more complete if it had had some sections on, perhaps,  "looking for tracks in mud, sand and snow", exploring colours in nature, maybe even lighting a fire and cooking…activities to take the reader beyond the book itself.

Two useful additions to the library shelf.

a moment of prehistoric domesticity

 * I have certainly used mounting board scraps from the local picture framers for good solid bases for "cave painting" and big sheets of black sugar paper for even quicker ones