Spring storytelling 2026

pop-up landscape

Spring stories, 2026

Stories in school and other excitements
with Creeping Toad,

celebrating the richness of the changing year with story-telling, 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!

Here are stories from the edge of summer, of new life and growth, of the green under old trees and the thrills of cold water in a mountain glen. and activities to enchant and inspire.

Gordon MacLellan – Creeping Toad –is back in northern Scotland in 2026. (Generally working around Inverness, reaching east to Forres and Elgin, west towards Ullapool, south to Strathdearn and north of Dornoch

Putting together a set of new stories and some new activities (with a few old favourites), Gordon will be in Scotland in May and again in the autumn.

Dates: 13 - 27th May 2026

24 -28th August 2026

For a sense of what else is going in Toadworld, take a look at this blog or visit the Toad Instagram 

Mammoths in Buxton snow!

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 might include: 

storytelling performances: lasting up to 60 minutes for up to 90 children at a time

a storybox

story boxes! 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 and finish with each child's new story built into a box of wonders.(allow 60 minutes for a class session)

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 depending upon age and theme we might make pop-up landscapes, storytowers or even foldedrivers that can run across a classroomfloor!

pop-up landscape

story characters: using found objects to inspire descriptions, we'll create a set of dramatic new characters and draw them or write them or make them as puppets



outdoor stories:(good for younger groups) ] starting with a traditional story we can head out into school grounds find the twigs, stones, feathers. leaves, grass, whatever, that will help us extend and complete the tale



simply treasure: picking up those boxes again; this time we could simply look at the world around us as a world where everything is precious and anything can be treasure: we'll forage, collect, map and maybe add a treasure-hunter or two

we can always spend time unpacking treasures!

Orchards and apples: we could pick up on the promise of richness with some orchard stories, tales of bilberries and brambles, unpredictable apple puppets (fake apples!), treasures hidden and jams made; who knows what stories wait among the fruit trees?

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

storytower

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…we can even build our own tiny castles, towerhouses and longships!

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: usually £280 a day. Fee includes storyteller’s fee, travel and materials. Can be paid on the day or I can invoice you. If I need to do a long journey for a single visit, I may have to charge more

a river pop-up unfolding into sunshine

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

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

 

Creativity, London

Creativity Conference,  London

 27th June 2025 
 Vue Cinema, Piccadilly, 

The Raindance Film Festival….and in one cinema we gather to talk about creativity, inspiration, passion and delight: what inspires us, how do we keep creativity flowing, how do we nurture our imaginations…. 

 I’m involved in two presentations at this first UK flowering of the Creativity Conference *

Wonder, Enchantment and Landscape: essentially, saying to people: let things go, abandon preconceptions and go for a walk: wherever: urban park, inner city street and plane tree square, mountain glen or roadside verge: just go and look and listen and breathe yourself into the richness of moss and stone and water and an excitement of dandelions….1 way of keeping creativity going: let the world have a conversation with you (presentations are only 9 minute long!)

 Then there is a panel on storytelling: 

Our starting point might be a few questions….but who knows where this will go! 

"why do we/you tell stories and maybe how do you use them?"    

"what sort of stories do you use?"   

"what do you hope the stories you use will do for the people who read/listen/experience them", which isn't necessarily the same as #1 above   

The answers to these are not likely to be discrete and starting at any one of them will bring in the others. I happily work across the spectrum of stories from ancient myth to 'just 5 minutes ago' craziness....maybe overall, for me there is the thought 

 "don't just say we use stories, it is good to think about why we use them and what we hope they can do." 

 Following up the conference 

 if it seems appropriate, I’ll post my powerpoint on google drive and add a link here

finding my books: 3 main books around just now 

Baba Yaga: tales of an old witch - a small booklet 

Waiting for the Snow: my latest collection of poems 

Old Stone and Ancient Bones: an earlier collection of poems (get through my website)

Sacred Animals: a manual for building a creative, personal spiritual relationship with the world around us

(links will take you to ebay pages for books...you could also visit my website's shop page)

The Creativity Conference is a global meeting of minds to explore the essence of creativity. We invite incredible creative speakers to share the wisdom they have gained from successful projects - and our definition for 'Creativity' is very particular: 'Any intentional decision'.

The Creativity Conference

Golden leaves and stories

 Gold Leaves and Fingerprints...

recent Creeping Toad adventures

in the rain in Corbar Woods: a damp and damper day that eventually drove us out of the woods and away from the last bluebells and the baby rabbits. But before the rain really hit, we heard about the Mystery of the Golden Leaf (spoiler: it was a cat on a scooter), and we met the fingerprint people who lives among the trees

footprints and other clues....

In Corbar Woods....

yesterday saw the second Leek Loves Books festival. More rain. But authors, talks, poets, the "What is Leek reading now" board (and the board itself made for very interesting reading....and round in the Toad corner I was telling stories and working with people to make puppets....and either making up stories to go with puppets or watching young people create their own puppet shows! The young people in these pictures all arrived together so i am hoping that the photos (sent in by a parent) are OK to use: if they aren't just let me know!

Lightbulb trees

Under the Lightbulb Trees

the Lost Stories of Glossop

Crystal trees and lightbulb trees

and the Rabbit who has an orchard of Easter Eggs,

Sunburst spiders,

a cat called Red Leicester,

and the place where unicorns go.....

 

Have you ever walked down a street and wondered, "Just what might have happened here?", or looked up at a building and thought "why on earth has it got that statue there?"

 

There is often (always?) a sensible response to questions like that. There are archives to explore, libraries to visit, historical societies to consult, maybe even householders to chat to...and those usually provide those sensible answers. With Lost Stories we were wandering off along uncharted streets and opening long lost story cupboards....Lost? Well, no, as that suggests that at some point, someone knew they were there. 

 

This project wasn't about sensible, historical or accurate answers. It was about sheer unbridled imagination. Encouraging participants to start with what they could see: in a photo, on a map, out of a window or growing next to them in a park and we then invited them to start drawing and talking and letting their imaginations run 

 

In a world where information and misinformation is so readily available, we wanted people to embrace an idea that simply invited them to come and out and play, here, where the cheese vans run, or, here, where the elephants wait, or, here!, where the unicorns play.

 

The Lost Stories of Glossop started with photos from the Glossop Heritage Trust and the Picture the Past archives and invited people to invent buildings, parks, and wild adventures that might have, could have, should have, happened in Glossop, Gamesley and Hadfield (with a quick detour to Chinley)

 

In the current collection, you can hear about those cheese vans, about a buried treasure that can traced by smell (only no-one dares to dig it up). Here is the Pink Palace of Chinley and the misadventures of William Worm.

 

The current collection of stories can be found at:

Lost stories texts

 

Lost Stories was part of the Glossop Hub for Derbyshire Makes, coordinated by High Peak Community Arts

 

and beyond a single reference, no-one knows anything more about Lightbulb trees. Funding is being sought now for an expedition into the Glossop Wilderness to find a grove of these rare plants and, for the first time ever, film them....or possibly find that dragons nest among the lightbulbs and eat camera crews....

And a little bit about Derbyshire Makes: 

Launching in February 2025, Derbyshire Makes shines a spotlight on the industrial history, inspiring landscapes and local communities that make Derbyshire unique. Taking place over three years, this programme of making-related events and activities begins with an annual free festival, from Friday 28th March to Sunday 27th April 2025. Spread across six local town centres in the spring, there will be walks, talks, exhibitions and more. A roving workshop on wheels. And a mass making project all about designing, making and showcasing textile-based creations – led by Alex Murphy, Derbyshire resident and recent contestant on the BBC’s The Great British Sewing Bee.

 

People from across Derbyshire and beyond are all invited to be a part of it: families, young people, adults and retirees. Come with your Nan, or your newborn. Make your mark, make a mess, and make a difference – because Derbyshire Makes needs you to make it special.

 

With many thanks to

Glossop Heritage Trust 

Derbyshire County Council:

Archives

Glossop Library

Gamesley Library

Hadfield Library

High Peak Borough Council

Derbyshire Makes

High Peak Community Arts

 

and all the scribblers and drawers, the cutters and gluers and storymakers and wonderfully crazy people who joined in our workshops!