storytellings, 2025

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 SOLD OUT

NEW TOUR DATES ADDED:

• 23rd - 30th June: Hereford and Worcester

 

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!

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

http://creepingtoad.blogspot.co.uk/

To book:

contact Gordon directly at

creepingtoad@btinternet.com

or by telephone: mobile: 07791 096857

slightly wild "prehistoric mouse"

Spring stories 2024

 

Spring stories, 2024

Stories in school and just about anywhere 

celebrating the richness of the changing year, here are stories, shadow puppets, book building, story-making, pop-up landscapes and boxes of treasures. Outdoors or indoors, the natural world will give us stories and offer inspiration for child-led creativity!

 

With stories spinning from the first signs of spring through mountain giants and excited rabbits to pirates and mermaids, 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 form the world around us and our discoveries there. Indoors, there may be shadow puppets and boxes of treasures to inspire children and encourage some fabulous stories”

 

A day’s visit to your school 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)

finger puppets: we can make quick finger puppet animals or adventurers and create instant stories

shadow puppets: playing with light, translucence and animation to create stories and instant performance ….see here for more information

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!

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: on request 

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/Yr 1 through to Secondary

 

 

For further information or to book:

contact Gordon directly at

            creepingtoad@btinternet.com

Shadows and stories

shadow puppet workshops with Creeping Toad

From classroom stories

To library adventures,

Museum mysteries

To enchanted gardens,

Join Creeping Toad to create some shadow puppet stories

Shadow puppet sessions with Creeping Toad offer a chance to play with light and shade, experiment with design and animation, colour and translucence…a workshop might lead to the beauty of forests playing across a classroom ceiling, a parade of historical characters or the delightful chaos of a flight of dragons

We can 

• Cut silhouettes adding coloured sections and textures
• Create lumpy monsters or delicate birds
• Fashion small characters with moving arms or legs or wings
• Think about buildings and windows, staircases and dungeons
• Make whole landscapes that fit onto rotating platforms and throw shapes across a wall or ceiling

In a school or public events, workshops need 90 mins – 2 hours (1 class at a time in schools) – ideal for 2 sessions in a day and a final performance

To find out more, contact Gordon (Creeping Toad) :

creepingtoad@btinternet.com

 

there was a very small mouse somewhere.....

Riding on a tiger...Buxton Wild Weeks, 2023

Riding on a tiger
Peak Dale Primary School
Creeping Toad and Buxton Wild Weeks, 2023

This summer, I am working with Buxton Wild Weeks who set out to "bring full weeks of nature-focussed activities to Buxton schools". There are wider community centred activities as well and like the school included in this report, schools that are coming in for a taster day or two this year and hopefully a deeper relationship in the future. To find out more, it's probably easiest to follow BWW on their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/buxtonwildweeks

But me? I'm a storyteller, artist and provoker of imaginations so in our day at Peak Dale Primary School, we tended to get carried away

A WALK IN THE WOODS

If we went for a walk in the woods,

We'd like to find

A fox to stroke,

A squirrel climbing a tree,

A rabbit hopping,

Bumblebees buzzing,

Beautiful flowers with bright butterflies

If we went for a walk in the woods,

We'd like to find

A dancing monkey clinging to a branch,

A werewolf at midnight,

Sharks in a stream.

If we went for a walk in the woods,

We/d like to come back,

Riding on a tiger.

With other classes, we were perhaps focussed more locally, but we did wander a bit....

EAGLE

Eyes of yellow

And

Grasping claws

Let nothing escape,

Ever.

We were experimenting with ways of drawings and colouring, enjoying working with stabilo and water colour pencils...

smudging colours with a damp finger

using a sharpie for finishing touches

We played with riddles and thoughtful moments.

FOX

Fire furred,

On silent feet,

yellow eyed,

Rabbit killer

FROG

On a sunny day,

The pond leaper with a sticky tongue

And grass green skin,

Watches the world

Through black and gold eyes,

And remembers when he was a tadpole,

And the world was wet and cold.

I really like this Grasshopper acrostic

GRASSHOPPER

Grass green,

Racing and jumping,

Away from danger to the

Safety of

Shadows under leaves, where

Happy hoppers,

Only in summer can have

Parties away from 

Parrots and

Every other danger from

Rain to

Snow.

And then there are always ...

MICE

With long tails and twitching whiskers,

Nibbling teeth and sharp claws,

Mice are the world's best,

Thieves of cheese

Some drawings told stories all in themselves...we had two stoats who found each other by following footprints (right across the class) and, old friends, were reunited 

And then there are the hedgehogs....

With many thanks to all the Buxton Wild Weeks Team and to all the staff, artists and poets of Peakdale Primary School

Cold mountains, hot deserts

Cold on a mountaintop

I spent a lively day this week in Our Lady and St Edwards Primary School in Birkenhead. We shared stories: Hiram Bingham and Machu Piccku ran alongside ancient stories of giants and the beautiful mountain sisters of Kintail with their dresses of green and winter cloaks of white. After stories from me,  our young artists and storytellers plunged into a world of extremes. We were writing about deserts and - or - mountains. There were discussions about camels, of when to walk across the hot sands of a wind-blown desert and whether the ancient goddess Sekhmet stands in the centre of every  whirling dust-devil. The red sands of Autralia might have been the blood-coloured beer that lured Sekhmet to sleep. Mountains like dragons. Mountains to fear, to wonder over. Mountains to climb and slide down.....

Mountains called up many feelings and the following grew out of a quick discussion….

This wind is bitter, cold on this freezing, beautiful, snow-covered mountaintop

I am so high up now, I am proud but exhausted, too, and anxious. The height overwhelms me when I look down, and down, and down. Going down goes on forever. And I am frozen, petrified by the knowledge that I need to climb all that way down. Why didn’t I pack a parachute?

Skeletal Stoats and lost stories

Trees, ghosts and forgotten churches

Hertfordshire Folkore

for the North Herts Museum

last minute reminder! Public event in Hitchin town Hall on Saturday 10th June, 

free, fun and hopefully rather strange!

Link here: Traditional Hertfordshire

I am now in Hitchin on a project for the N Herts Museum service. Sharing stories from the county's folklore - giants, highwaymen, murders and misdemeanours, and a healthy brood of ghosts, is leading my groups to start sharing new stories - or maybe old stories new discovered lurking in the woods, houses and imaginations of the county's younger residents.....

First contributions here - with many thanks to Sandon Primary School!

The Hauntings of Sandon
pages, scraps, fragments torn from a tattered book
There are stories here, secrets hidden in the shadows, tales kept in cupboards, under floorboards, in dusty boxes under dusty beds.
These are the adventures found in bold boys and brave girls and the courage of everyone

 

The Woods of Hidehall Farm
There is a path through the trees that will take you to a church, and old church with older churches beneath it, haunting it with the memories of lost prayers. Even the cemetery is restless, here, disturbed by the Skeletal Stoat digging bones from the graves

A fluttering bat might lead you, deep and deeper into the woods where gentle rabbits play and moles and voles forage. Foxes run in packs like wolves in these woods, where the trees are always watching

There are
Grumpy trees here,
And fruit trees,
And talking trees,
And trees walking on their roots as legs.
There are
Spooky trees here,
And shadow trees,
And purple trees,
And conker trees,
Deep and deeper into the woods
There is even a Candy Cane Tree.

These are the woods where Oscar, the last T rex hides. He saw Piers Shonks kill his cousins as dragons and since then these woods have held him safe. There are even stranger creatures than dinosaurs in the shadows under the trees

The last of the Herts Highway Robbers lurk here. You may walk into our woods. You may enjoy our old churches and ancient trees. You may wonder at our wildlife. You may walk out at the end of your visit. But you may well be missing something - just hope it is only your money!

I especially like the elegant Higwaywoman!

Sandon
A street of wonders and marvels, where highwaymen loiter and a fox runs through the garden, where friendly people stand outside their houses and even the ghosts are smiling, where a horse and carriage will take you to where, or when, you want to go

Highway Robbers lived in these houses once, watching from the window, using cats and dogs and  children to spy on travellers.

Their gold is here still. Holes have been dug. Gold-siffing dogs and gold-snuffling pigs used but it has never been found
Children play in this perilous village and keep dragons as pets. They put out food for dinosaurs and nest boxes for flying carpets. When their best friends are not other children or rats they are ghosts or sometimes all three

A Blade of Grass

A blade of grass

art workshops in Rudheath and Witton

Victoria Road Primary School

Jo, poised and reaady for making!

As part of the Do It Together Project, for Rudheath and Witton Togather, two of our artists, Jo Thilwind and Sarah Males, are working with the families of Victoria Road Primary School. Over this term they will see each class for half a day of creativity with natural materials, with parents and carers invited to join in

The following is a personal comment from Jo. I’m not going to add anything - I think this stands as a wonderful description of a session…

One of the tools of my trade. A blade of grass.
Having wept all morning over the Manchester bomb, going to hell and back wondering if my Son was ok, (he is), and feeling tearful and sick to my belly, I had to do an environmental art workshop at a school this afternoon.
I considered even writing this post given the circumstances today, but life must go on and it's turned out to be a beautiful and inspiring day.

I had the usual comments 5 minutes in about "am I a Witch?" , (what do they see?) And an incredible fascination with my jewellery. A conversation about my silver Pentacle.... 'Did I know it was a spiritual symbol?' , and the look on her face when I showed her the tattooed one on my wrist.
We made natural frames, with 3d pictures of nature, created with what they had collected outside. There was some initial huffing and puffing from these 10/11 yr olds, but actually they embraced it with passionate gusto and made some wonderful work. One lad got so into it he exclaimed, " I was wrong when I said I hate nature, it's brilliant!!".... The whole class laughed, and my heart quietly smiled. Another girl called me over to say I was a brilliant teacher because I'd given them something so exciting to do. They absolutely loved it.

I wandered around the class with a piece of lemon balm and got each and every one of them to smell it, and watched their faces light up in pleasure and amazement.
The whole session was once again sprinkled with magick. But my absolute favourite bit, was when I pulled a handful of grass out of my basket. The type with a big fluffy seed head on it, a couple of blades of grass attached. A bouquet if you will, grasped this morning from the field. "would anyone like a piece of lovely grass for their artwork?" says I, offering it like the the most glorious blossoms ever beheld, and suddenly I was surrounded by kids, carefully choosing their particular piece of treasure, a single blade of grass, gently removing it from my hand with such care, and taking it back to their desk to weave it with love and thought into their frame. I was blown away. Such reverence, such respect, such a new and unexpected view of the natural world for youngsters who previously hadn't given it the slightest thought. What a wonderful day. Humbled.
I love my work.
Bright Blessings x

The mysteries of Fallibroome

Magic, mystery and wild imagination

Fallibroome Creativity Week

13 - 18th February 2017 

The Wizard of Alderley

  

What a week that was! I’ve arrived at Sunday after 5 days (Saturday was caught up in remarkably sensible discussions elsewhere)of giants and aliens, adventurous children, terrible dragons, a wizard, a horse and a set of sleeping knights, 100 painting, gluing artists, an eagle…

It begins to read like a shopping list for an adventure tale – but that would be another story

This week was Fallibroome Academy’s Creativity Week (this year’s theme was “Magic and Mystery”) where children from the partner primary schools all throw themselves (quite literally, there is a lots of dance and drama) into days that set imaginations free and running

Dragon 7

He arrives like curtains drawn across the sun

An exploding volcano of a dragon

His teeth are a saw,

Housed in the doom of his jaws

Eyes that glow as bright as lava,

Welcome you to the burning pools of his heart

first ideas for aliens

Trips to the Whitworth and Manchester Art Galleries, rub creative shoulders with adventurous science, dance workshops, Forest School and…I’m involved as one of the artists so tend to get swallowed by my sessions and don’t really build a sense of the whole thing other than the sheer scale of the organisation. But it is wild and wonderful and the Thursday evening sees a sharing event at Fallibroome where children and excited families fill the whole theatre. This year we saw dancing cats (well done, Mottram!), an almost abstract Wizard of Alderley (Nether Alderley – magnificent), the Wizard as a drama, Peter Pan in 5 minutes (well controlled, Tinkerbell). There were sound experiments on stage, a wonderful rescue of a stolen bride with fire breathers and jugglers and dancers (just what every rescue needs) and Fallibroome’s own dance club showed just what out of school clubs can offer determined young people. (Apologies for anyone I missed)

Dragon 5. 

Angry lightning,

A Lion’s roar,

A midnight evil,

Her heart a closed door

enchantment window in progress

But for my sessions….we went from charming – aliens from the book “The Loon in the Moon”, to mysterious – enchantment windows (you never know what you might see when you look through – we hoped for unicorns), to magnificent – a 3metre long frieze of Alderley Edge with contributions from 90 children, to captivating…images of the storytowers will follow. I did lots. The children I worked with did more. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and hope children did too!

a small but cheerful alien

Then we hit the Bollinbrook Dragons….I make no judgement, just post some of the reports below. The photos didn’t even get that far

 

Dragon 1. 

Diamond bright eyes in lizard scale skin

Dagger teeth are butcher’s knives

And his breath scorches in a shotgun blast

And his soul,

His frozen soul would freeze your heart

Dragon 2. 

She is a bright summer day until you open the wardrobe doors of her heart

Bedrock bones and dagger teeth,

With cheetah stealth she’ll stalk you,

Watching from eyes as cold as glaciers,

Welcoming you into the cauldron of her mouth

And the dark abyss of her winter soul

And we ended with the Friday afternoon giants of Mottram. At least we can end on some smiling faces. Don’t know what they are smiling about, of course...

Giant

Our giant is a stormy night in winter

With arms that cling as tight and wrap as strongly as a squid’s tentacles

His fingers prickles like cactus spines

He is an exercise machine of a giant,

Fast, strong, relentless,

Spring-loading his legs into trampolines,

He hammers people as nails into the ground,

But his hunger,

His hunger is a black hole that could swallow whole worlds.

at least some of our giants smiled!

With many thanks to all the staff and children (and apologies to the cleaners) of

Whirley Primary School

Bollinbrook Primary School

Upton Priory Primary School

Nether Alderley Primary School

Mottram St Andrew Primary School

And Fallibroome Academy!