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...

The Hatching 6: the river awaits the fish

"a ripple of change"

Heasandford Primary School

12th March 2015

growing fry and their reflections

The fry are growing, their days indoors numbered now. Next week, fingerlings will swim free, out into the wildness and danger of the open water and this years's Trout Raising Scheme with the Ribble Rivers Trust will start putting its aquaria away

This nearness of change became reflected in our songs and artwork during a day with 2 classes of trout-keepers at Heasandford Primary School

designing a river

I'm happy in my tank, I've got lots of friends

I love my life here, I hope it never ends

Oh no, there's something wrong, there's another fish gone

1 down but 99 going strong

A pike is on the loose, I'd better swim away

Hiding under pebbles, that where I'll lay

Our fishkeepers know perils will surround their charges and hope their fish will be wary of fishermen and bigger fish and kingfishers and bullies. They know that alevins get eaten straight away or might starve to death

Our children also know that this is also a new chapter in these fishy little lives and they hope there will be excitement and space, freedom and rapids to swim in. There might even be romance and a fishy family of their own

A trout like me that's small and sweet

That's the fish I'd like to meet

 I was taken to the river, it's much more fun

Jumping up a waterfall, now I'm free

The river Brun's the place to be

Heasandford song 2 "I'm a trout"
Heasandford song 3

Many thanks to all our artists, musicians 

and songsmiths at Heasandford

waterfall and leaping trout

Over the high hills

Over the high hills, on a dark stormy night,

Past the dead woods, where the wolves ran,

Under the bridge where the fish swim,

Through the lost glen, beyond the lost village,

There, at the end of everything, is the lost house.

Working today in Gergask Primary School produced some very strange sports for the Commonwealth Games. How short-sighted of the organisers not to include pond-diving (winners are marked on their upright posture and their feet sticking out of the water), food fights (Bronze level with pies, Silver with mushy peas, Gold with mashed potato) or pillow fights on stepping stones. They have also overlooked fence-leaping, tyre-rolling and the delights of boulder tennis

But then we got onto hopes and ambitions and dreams to be fulfilled and were sent on the journey recorded above....

Most of the time, while I have carefully planned the workshop, I feel I have no idea at all what is going on! I know I didn't get a copy of the Quest for the Red Tiger or The Stolen Princess (parts 1 or 2), but here is some boulder tennis....

and a beginning of castles, knights and naughtiness

not sure about these two....

And many thanks to the Gergask Crew (potential pirates all!) - I haven't used all your photos but thanks for all your help and enthusiasm!

And what did the hedgehog do?

The Northern Tour begins: Linlithgow Primary School

P7 classes were building pop-up story landscapes

And what did the Hedgehogs do to try to save their bald little selves from the foxes?

learned to dig and turned into moles!

Put sticks in their ears so they wouldn't fit down a fox's throat...

got piles of stones to throw at the foxes.

...ran away very fast

 glued grass all over themselves so they were disguised

same idea but they used twigs and bark instead

covered themselves with stinging nettles but that hurt too much

wrapped themselves up in sticky-willy so the foxes couldn't eat them

ate lots of smelly plants

no hedgehogs here, but a story of how the bush-baby got big eyes!

and then at that last breakfast, what delicious dishes were the foxes planning....

hedgehog ice cream!

hedgehog cake

hedgehog pizza and sausages and chips and crisps

hedgehog milk shake

hedgehog cereal with milk and sugar

hedgehog porridge

hedgehogs on toast

hedgehog bacon with fried hedgehogs and eggs

chocolate hedgehogs

Thank you Primary 1 classes! For possibly more sensible information about hedgehogs (I am not going to guarantee the sensible bit), you might like to pursue my lovely friend Hugh's latest book: Hedgehog

And Primary 7s were building landscapes and stories

The Hatching 8: a long river pop-up

In our final Ribble Trout workshops, we were making long pop-up landscapes that fitted together to make long unfolding rivers that could run right across a classroom. These proved almost impossible to photograph effectively so i tried on my sample one without much more success!

Here are some images anyway to try to get an idea of what we were going for....

2 pop-ups locked together give us a rippling river

a third pop-up extends the flow

a close-up for the final panel

Fallibroome: van Gogh's secrets

Fallibroome Academy Arts Week

a table of van Gogh's

...and in that quiet, unassuming corner of Cheshire called Prestbury, a group of young detectives (including several supermen, Scooby-Doo, a fairy who kept her wand tucked down a boot to be quick on the draw, a lion and a very fluffy fox*) detected the stories that lay all unknown behind some of van Gogh's most famous works, including the act who sat on the roof to watch the Starry Night and the boy who knocked the Sunflowers over....

I'm not sure if van Gogh himself ever got to Egypt, let alone rode on a camel

And did he ever know about the very untidy hippo who slept in that bedroom and who got into trouble from her mother because of the mess?

Superman to the rescue!

a sinister moment

And after all that excitement, we animated some of scenes and told tales in pop-up-theatres of romance, and cooking and occasionally horrible deaths...

Thanks very much, Prestbury CE Primary School!

*It was a non-uniform day to support a local hospice and added an extra surreal touch to an already strange day!

Fallibroome: a week of wild weather and wilder creativity!

I'm not sure that van Gogh expected the picnic

Fallibroome Academy - a specialist Arts College in Macclesfield, every year runs an Arts Week with a collection of Primary Schools. This year they had the immense good sense (or the unparalleled recklessness, read it as you will!) to book me as one of the visiting artists

feathers for the Nether Alderley Eagle

I've had a great week of delicious adventures from the Great Fire of London to swarms of strange ribbon-and-rod puppets, from feathering a giant eagle to roaming the world with Year 1s and today discovering the bits that van Gogh never quite got round to painting

a cheerful character from Broken Cross

I didn't get as many photos as I would have liked - so more will follow as they come in from schools

We are the Mottram Storytellers and we would like to take you on an adventure,

Come with us

Through the haunted, abandoned village where the ghosts watch,

Avoid the mysterious mine with creepy, creaking noises;

Over the narrow enchanted bridge where the crocodiles live

And piggyback on an Ogre through the warm, snake-infested, slime-gooey 

Swamp of Swallowed Souls in the Jungle of Misery and Despair.

Come into our enchanted wood,

Crawl under the twisted tree branches

But beware they don’t tie you into the trunk.

Climb over the bushy tree,

Squeeze between the two trees where something is waiting

Dig under the magical, bendy. twisty, mystical blossom tree

Climb the ladder to the tree top house.

And rest!

Follow your favourite smell

Through our wild wood,

Mint, beefburger or chocolate,

Will take you into our jail 

Of tree-roots and branches

Where you will rest on a pile of bones

Escape!

Squeeze! Through the ancient bones of prisoners and trees!

Squeeze! Between the twisted, tangled, mossy branches

Dig up! Dig out! Dig under the dark enchanted roots and...

Climb over the redwood tree

Slide past the ash,

Find the glimmering, golden key

That unlocks a door to the past!

With many thanks to the staff and pupils of "my" schools - more images follow in the next two blogs

Nether Alderley Primary School

Broken Cross Community School

Upton Priory School

Mottram St Andrew Primary Academy

Prestbury CE Primary School

Strange towers and creepy houses

Thomas' frightening castle!

Shhh! tiptoe up the stairs!

the door creaks open....

The floorboards groan under tentative toes...

The swamp heaves and waits. Wetly.

In a dark castle beyond the mountains...

Castle's were popular subjects....

we even got Mums and Dads
to make their own story-cards!

A Summer Reading Challenge workshop for Nottinghamshire Libraries. In magnificent West Bridgford Library (well done, West B for making sure this was built! What a place!), an intrepid company gathered to turn their own ideas about spooky houses and sinister settings into pop-up cards

We gathered our first ideas into a collective poem

Crescent moon, full moon, no moon at all! 

The ghost train will bring you 

Along the haunted line,

Past golden palaces and beautiful gardens

To the Creepy House.
Full of bats and spiders,
Cobwebs and ghosties
Watching from windows.

monkeys rather than crows, but still watchful!

Crows sitting on treetops
Spy on everything
And bats flap
Through the woods.
A strange dark figures
Walks silently down the long path
Through the wood of dead trees.

Graveyards and tombstones
A witch fies across the moon
Creepers that catch you
Vampires that follow you

Milly's House

Milly* told us a story of
a girl who went on adventure with a pocketful of apples. She bravely walked up to the front of the spooky house and knocked on the door....
"What would you taste like?", 
"Squashed slugs!" she said. 
"I like slugs" said he. 
"But i am as tough as an old tree", said she
"If you bite me, your teeth will break!" 
He smiles and there are no teeth left in his mouth....

Fintan went for swamps

while Tristan preferred the beach

There was a terrible news about Tristan's beach pop-up because just after he made it, he disappeared from his bedroom. But a small boy's face could be seen looking out of one of the windows in the huts. The face wasn't there before...

...but almost anything is better than disappearing
 in the swamp in Rowan's story

Charlotte sent divers deep under the sea

I love the detail here!

a dragon in a cave!

(* my apologies to anyone whose name I've got wrong! Let me know and I'll correct them)