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"

stepping stones

The Stepping Stone riddle

stories from a river's running, part 3 

 

 The river continues to run, and the stories continue to grow, with new tales today from the storymakers and artists of Class 4 Gisburn Rd Primary School

Through stories and photos, we gathered ideas for mythological characters: who might live in your chosen place on the river”. Stories unfolded, building lifestories, hopes, dreams and despairs for our charcaters. then our characters were transformed into flags and we saw bridges and fish, red witches with long fingers and a shoal of swimming fish….

 

bridge flag in development

1. There is
An ancient bridge
Over an ancient river
Where an ancient perch
Swims in a waterfall’s pool.
This is an enchanted fish
Who curses anyone
Who tries to catch its friends.

Try to catch me?
Try to catch my friends?
You’ll never catch us!
You’ll never catch anything ever again!

2. Seaweed hair and dead worm lips

with crab slippers on his crabby feet,

Rapid is a thief who will pick the pockets

of anyone or anything who comes too near the riverbank

flag reveal

3. The red shark is lonely. His only friend is the red witch. “I want a friend, but I am alone. No-one wants me. So I get angry and I see red…” 

4. The land of Tyvon
After many centuries, there still stands on the wasteland shore, beside an enchanted river, an enchanted hut and in that hut is an enchanted book. In that river is an enchanted breed of fish and the enchantment of the fish is found on page 2850 of the enchanted book. The enchantment means that these fish are healing fish, healing people with their Tyvonion spells

5. Don’t catch my fish,
Don’t shoot my birds,
If you don’t solve my riddle
you will be turned into a stepping stone at dawn
For our beautiful river.
(*What is the riddle, you ask? Another story, for another day!)

Working with the Ribble Rivers Trust, this is a week of workshops, building to a celebration of River Tales next week, sharing artwork that celebrates the drama, mystery and biodiversity of a river. Classes involved have visited a local river, and with Creeping Toad are using that knowledge to create artwork and next week will bring all that creativity together

With many thanks to all our artists from 

 Year 4 of Gisburn Rd Primary School

not quite finshed

Cold water and icy rocks: children's adventure stories

Between cold water and icy rocks: 

adventures in the Moorlands

Hollinsclough Cof E Academy

Come with us,

Let us take you on a journey

Into the lost worlds of Hollinsclough.

 

c/o Kieran Metcalfe

We started with old stories, with Gawain and the Green Knight, with tales of foxes and rabbits and crows. Then we shook it all up, added our favourite places, seasoned with heroes and villains and wonderful animals, stirred in a spoonful of treasures shook it all about a bit and let everything to ferment

HollinscloughC of E Academy is a small school resting on the land between the headwaters of the Dove and the Manifold Rivers and under the shadow of Axe Edge. And I was there as part of a project for Borderland Voices with funding from South WestPeak Landscape Partnership to use old stories to inspire new responses to the aldnscape and communities of the Staffordshire Moorlands

It all got a bit carried away….

Lud's Church

We peer down deep, dark, creepy holes, and see a glowing eye,

And see an awful hand reaching out with a deadly pie,

And on through a gorge, under a starry, cloudy sky

To a mysterious temple where legends live,

Until at last we

Sit beside an old crumbling castle

Waiting for the pig ghosts to come snuffling through the woods,

The pig ghosts that will haunt us.

We gathered ideas grew a story poem for each class then left individual stories for children to pursue: there were tales of nightmares and reindeer, and rabbits. There was at least one flying carpet and the castle that we can’t find any more

c/o James Lampard

Where a lonely owl calls,

A long empty voice

Like the ghosts of lost children,

Echoing through the forest,

As the owl swoops between the trees,

Flies through the arches of the old bridge,

And disappears.

Then we recorded the poems…..

So can we invite you to

Find a hare who sits on a stone in the sunshine,

Follow the hare as it leaps through the grass,

Follow the hare over the field where the rabbits play,

Hopping home to the castle where they dig burrows under the stone.

And visit some of our poem slideshows….

Ancient animals of the Moorlands: Badger class,(4 – 7 years old)

Ancient animals, round

Between coldwater and icy rocks, Foxes Class ( 8 – 12 years old)

The old woman round

An extra nightmare

The voices are those of some of the children who wrote the pieces

With many thanks

to all our artists, storytellers and poets

to Borderland voices and South West Peak

and to James Lampard, HelenKennedy 

and Kieran Metcalfe for the use of their photos 

(the Lud's Church image is my own)

c/o Helen Kennedy

Lollipop Stew

The stolen lollipop stew

and other misdaventures

Summer Reading Challenge in Leicestershire Libraries

we started with drawings

would you trust this travel agent?

My workshops for Leicestershire Libraries Summer Reading Challenge continued into more libraries and even stranger stories….(wander perilously here to encoutner earlier adventures) I don’t think activities need any more description than the following moments of words and pictures (the two do not necessarily coincide!)

“Let me sell you a holiday”,
Said the 20 fingered travel agent,
“A flying carpet, Granny,
For you and your cat and the book mouse
And Gogo the dog” and in the desert
A grumpy camel
Pursued by velociraptors on another holiday from long ago.

the Joker looking for a new naughty crew

The lollipop stew was stolen,
But the thief was chased down the street,
By a hungry giraffe
And an out of control sheep
And a desparate sheep-girl.
The stew slopped out of its bowl and everyone , even the cheetah, was sticky
Until Maggie, our Mum,
Came up with her elephant and showered everyone clean.

competition for places on The Joker's crew

The stomping monster stomped,
A stomping dance,
She stomped, he stomped, we all stomped together,
Stomping down the street,
Stomping through the forest,
Through the jungle,
Over the grass,
Up the mountain,
Stomping, stomping, stomping all the way….

These are the stories we were never told,
These are the books we’ve never read,
These are the adventures we’re waiting to have.

a mermaid, there was one who sneakily gave people seaweed wigs

Scribblemonsters and
Lily the Slug Girl and 
Mr Mischiloos (and the witch with the green hair) and his cousin
Mistroo the Magician.
A volcano erupts cold pumpkin soup.
And a giant snail with giant slime.
There are snakes.

a mischievous girl

There was a purple mouse in a
Purple house at the top of a
Purple tree with a lot of
Purple bees making
Purple honey

In an ordinary house on an ordinary street lived an
Extraordinary girl with an orange dog with a red tummy

the velociraptors got a bad holiday deal as well

 The King’s orange cat likes licking
Armour and icing sugar
And the kings legs and just about anything

a cat and her book-mouse

With many thanks to all the artists, puppeteers, storytellers and staff of 

Shepshed, Glenfield, Blaby, Lutterworth and Earl Shilton libraries

Thanks for all your enthusiasm, drawings, makings and wild imaginings 

and my apologies for not managing to post pictures of

everyone's puppets or pieces from all the stories!

A gleaming stone

A wyrm uncoils and Grendel's Mum sighs...

Adlington Primary School

Fallibroome Creativity Week

 We started with Grendel, a good place to start, unravelling the mystery of the dweller in the swamp, alliterating the patterns of his life and his mother, and weaving our own heroic adventures.

on the outskirts of Jotunheim, in a wild wood where dark shadows moved,
slimy samon surfaced in the shallow river where wombats wobble in the wicker weeds

In a deep, dark forest,
Tall trees tower in a wailing wind
While the wolf wove his path through the blackness

And through a cave where strange creatures crept in sinister shadows
Spiders spun stunning webs while waiting to snare slimy slugs
And have them for their terriic tea

A river rushing, racing, raging over round rocks dashing down, down, down into
the deepest darkest swamps where savage snakes are joyfully jogging and jumping

A crumbling castle on a crumbling crag where
Wandering werewolves wailed and terrorized the trembling townsfolk

We moved onto artefacts, choosing treasures from my hoard: shells, brass shoes, horns, a goblet, a chest, a tankard made of pewter, another of horn, the dark glass of a necklace salvaged from the windswept wreckage of a viking longship

It’s a masterpiece from a mermaid who paints. It was given to me by the mermaid herself on a journey through a mystical ocean. Gold fish with delicate tails are painted onto the blackness of the wondrous sea stone with grace, care and skill. The gleaming fish are a glittering gold and look lke queens in the blackness. And when I hold it the centre shines like the sun as it sinks below the horizon.

the beginning of a wonderful wolfskin story

 

With many thanks to the teachers and artists of Adlington, and to all the schools I visited in  Creativity Week. i took lot of photos which my camera seems to have  eaten them!

 

Wild words and leafy pages: training course

 

Wild words and leafy pages

4th October 2017
9.30am - 4.30pm
Dartington Estate, Totnes
£75 | £95 | £120 *

I am leading this day for Wildwise - contact them for bookings but details follow:

playful creativity

A day to play with words, this workshop encourages participants to find “adventures everywhere”... anywhere. It will offer activities designed to draw inspiration from simple observation, fostering confidence in participants own skills and encouraging innovation within supportive activity structures. The activities used will also allow ideas to merge as a number of short activities flow together to give longer more intricate adventures
The activities used here have been tried and tested with family groups, on adult events and with school children - often in situations where Literacy is an issue and activities are needed that remove worry and fear and encourage simple enjoyment of words

Programme will include:

• first words: setting out on an adventure 
• adventures everywhere: short activities with minimal equipment for use outside 
• holding onto adventures: ways of recording our words 
• bigger stories: working in groups to make quick, longer pieces

celebrate wonder

Activity options:

• developing story characters,
• deriving adventures from found objects or artefacts
• making your own books
• the value of treasure
• story bundles

* rates for individuals / charities / businesses

For late availability and/or last minute bookings please call 07919 093784
 BOOK NOW: here

Wild words workshop

Wild words and leafy pages

a training course

there are stories everywhere

Tuesday 8^th November 2016

at Dartington

a workshop for teachers, artists, storytellers, playleaders, Forest School leaders...

Organised by Wildwise 

Cost: £115/90/70

Booking details from Wildwise

simple activities can capture a whole story

This workshop will include activities that can be used to help groups of all ages use language to explore, enjoy and celebrate their environment.   We will play with words: creating stories, poems, instant adventures and terrible tales. We will explore exciting ways of holding onto written words with bog books, folded libraries, mapsticks, pop-up storyscapes and tiny, runaway characters.   

A day to enjoy words, this workshop encourages participants to find “adventures everywhere”... anywhere. It will offer activities designed to draw inspiration from simple observation, fostering confidence in participants own skills and encouraging innovation within supportive activity structures. The activities used will also allow ideas to merge as a number of short activities flow together to give longer more intricate adventures

The activities used here have been tried and tested with family groups, on adult events and with school children - often in situations where Literacy is an issue and activities are needed that remove worry and fear and encourage simple enjoyment of words

 

mapping a class' adventure

Programme will include

            first words: setting out on an adventure

            adventures everywhere: short activities with minimal equipment for use outside

            holding onto adventures: ways of recording our words

            bigger stories: working in groups to make quick, longer pieces

            Activity options:

                        developing story characters,

                        deriving adventures from found objects or artefacts

                        making your own books

                        the value of treasure

                        story bundles

 

characters are always waiting for their story...

                       

A crocodile of words

A crocodile of words  

and the 

spinning plate of death

a moment of peace at Chanonry Point

there were bits...

Following on from a woodful of stories, last week dropped me into a whirlpool of schools and groups, classes and bits. Bits and bits and more bits.There were witches and monsters, tales out of old Scotland and relics of Robert the Bruce’s last meal. I have roamed from Auldearn to Strontian with Inverness in-between and have ended up in Dollar.

Inspired by Krindlekrax, in one class we created a crocodile of words:
Midnight and thunder and lightning,
A pebble-dashed log,

A creeping camera flash,
Spiky.
Pointed as needles,
Waiting like a cave.

We got the words down first as the scales then swallowed excitement in colour and shape and set one little group off creating their own crocodile….

We told stories of Old Scotland and made new Lost Tales of Old Scotland with the old woman who defended herself with a plate, with this very plate here, spinning it like a frisbee to slice the heads off her attackers. There were enchanted frogs, wonderful treasures, mysterious rooms and dangerous children…there were even a few aliens who came down and spirited away a whole class

And finally, I spent a day at the Three Lochs Book and Arts Festival in Strontian where stories unfolded between the mountains and the lochs

Thanks and delights to the artists and storymakers of Auldearn Primary, Dalneigh Primary, Balloch Primary, and the Ardnamurchan schools

precision drawing

A woodful of stories

On tour, 

northern Scotland 

September 2016

a cloth, a drum and a kettle: ingredients for adventure

the terrible tongue fisherman

Down in the woods, on a boat in a pool, an angler hopes for sharks as he dangles his long tongue in the water. His friend launches baited hooks from his two rods, because of course you need two lines when fishing for octopus. 

a watchful tree

But the tree people watch, a dangerous squirrel broods, a unicorn that poohs rainbows canters by and a lone wolf-cub wanders through the woods of Evanton, wondering if she is the really the last wild wolf in Scotland. The situation, escalates: the fisherman's mast topples over, throwing him into the water but striking the matches in his bag setting a forest fire in motion,
causing a general stampede, 
attracting a passing dragon (romance on the horizon),
calling for unicorn rainbow rescues, 
a small twiggy firelog who extinguishes the fire with his eyes  
but that annoys the dragon, 
while the squirrels are peeing on the embers but  (I hope you are following this, there will be a test at some point)
one ember hatches a new, golden, dragon, 
and then the woodland fairies offer wolfhood to anyone who fancies it and the woods erupts into werewolves (or squirrelwolves, and treewolves and barkwolves.....).
So at the end, the fisherman is eaten by tadpoles, the wolf has a fmaily and two dragons fly off into the sunset and there is a party in the wood....

busy puppeteers

 
I’m back up in the north, telling stories, making puppets and generally leading people astray all over the place. Excitements his week include lots of chidlren in Rosebank Primary School and then two days with Evanton Community Wood: a school storywalk, a teacher-training session and then a day of public events where about 100 people joined us for messy, cheerful, leafy, twiggy, storyful sessions
A pause now on the Black Isle to gather what few wits I’ve ever had and prepare for another week of liveliness - and for the 3 Lochs Festival on Friday

props waiting for stories to unfold around them

Thanks to all the children, teacher,s parents and 

puppeteers of Rosebank and Evanton

worksheets for stories with young children

Stories Alive! the worksheets

Ideas for creating adventurous stories, songs, poems, palaces and sacks!

a storyworld taking shape

Over 2015, Stories Alive! placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire. Our teams have been challenged to develop sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are all working with. There have been storyhouses built, storysacks made, stories mapped, little adventures, big adventures, whole storyworlds of adventure. 

a storyhouse

Out of all the Stories Alive! workshops and twilight sessions, we have grown a spreading collection of activities to use with young children. Some of our activities needed lots of bits (but rarely very specialised), others just needed people, some plastic plates and a few minutes. We have drawn activities together, distilling them into a set of worksheets which are now available (free of charge) for downloading (please go to this page on my website to find the download).

We offer these activities to anyone who is interested. Please feel free to use them – but if you want to post them somewhere else please acknowledge Stories Alive! as a source. This website could be included as an information point about the project and my email used as a first contact (I can always refer enquiries on to a more relevant person).

The activities are not final. In many ways these are our working notes. We have tried to avoid repetition but at times there are overlaps between activities. We kept them all in, knowing that different people suit different styles: so please sift, choose and experiment. We hope you will have as much fun as we did – or even more.

If you do download a set of worksheets, it would be good to hear from you – even just to say who you are and where you hope to be making up stories with young children…

a plastic plate adventure

Adventure booklet: we have also produced a little booklet designed for use by families to create their own adventure. This uses some of the worksheet activities but aims to keep everything very straightforward so a slightly harassed parent with some over-excited children in the local park could all work together to create their own adventures.

There will a few extra hard copies of this available (summer 2016) – if you would like a copy let me know and I’ll see what we can do. A downloadable version might go on here shortly

Nursery schools involved

Taywood 

Newtown

Rockwood

Basnett Street

Rosegrove 

Artists involved

ARTISTS

Carol Ferro

Hannah Stringer

Kerris Casey St Pierre of Spiral Designs

Ben McCabe

Gordon MacLellan - Creeping Toad - me!