Spring stories

Stories for the beginning of summer

the lodge at Beacon Hill

Over Beltane weekend, I'm doing two sets of storytelling to welcome the changing season

These will have a distinctly magical feel and might include tales of old Ireland and from the mountains and glens of Scotland. Then again, they might not.  There will, however, almost certainly be boggarts and beasties and probably some gurt hairy lumps and certainly a few flowers and quite possibly a tale out of the deep midwinters of long ago - just so we don't forget the snow that has been and that will roll around again!

Friday 3rd May, Matlock storytellingcafé

6.45pm: food available and  drinks, etc

7.30 - 10: stories start (with a break) through to 10pm

Tickets cost £7 from Greenway Cafe, Snitterton Road, Matlock or call 01629 580023

Storytelling Cafe is in the Imperial Rooms, Matlock, DE4 3NL

Sunday 5th May: Beacon Hill Country Park, Leicestershire

Join myself and the Beacon Hill team for a lively Beltane day. The event is free (car parkingcharges apply)   and will include stories in the big lodge (it's beautiful - come along just for the tipi if nothing else!), music and games. Usually there is a delightfully wild Morris side and often maypole dancing (and often that is improvised, too!). Bring a picnic and make a day of it - and when you can't take the merriment any more, walk up to the top of the Beacon Hill  - the second highest point in Leicestershire and made up of some of the oldest rocks in England

Beacon Hill

morris with lots of shouting!

Hoorah for the small and wriggly!

When the tide runs out: life in ancient rockpools

a finger-crinoid rests on our Ancient Landscape

We've just had a lovely day at Castleton Visitor Centre in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire. After snow a couple of weeks ago closed the centre, and the roads, and dramatic Winnatt's Pass, and froze our first "ancient rockpools" day out, today really counted as the start of public workshops for our Ancient Landscapes project

 

a sample rockpool was used to get people started

86 people joined us during the day to look at fossils and models of ancient

dangerous fish!

animals, and to stroke, prod, squeeze and generally explore our Ancient Landscape installation. Then most people made for themselves either a fossil fingerpuppet or an ancient rockpool from these far-off Carboniferous days (or both). Given what we were finding in our imagined rockpools, it's probably just as well we humans weren't around then!

We did make some practical discoveries, however, including "the easy way to draw a trilobite" - details will follow in another blog. And we met Toby with his lovely fossil blog - why not take a look? Fossilfriends

hoorah for the small and wriggly!

This project's activities always raises that question of " exact should we be" very nicely: just how much do we push "this is what it looked like"? On the whole, we share ideas, samples and models with people and let them improvise...so our orthocone nautiloids end up looking suspiciously like belemnites, and the few trilobites that were still around in Carboniferous days were almost certainly not a spectacular as our ones. And Hoorah for the soft wriggly and unexpected things that have never, ever been fossilised! But it si good to embrace a world without dinosaurs and to find people are quite happy working with small wriggly, squirmy, swimmy creatures and to ponder the shapes of ancient seaweeds....

But mostly, we made things....

Next event is Saturday 6th April -Miller's Dale

Skulls!

Book of the moment: Skulls

Skulls, an exploration of Alan Dudley's curious collection

Simon Winchester

Black Dog & Leventhal, 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-57912-912-5

A beautiful book. It celebrates bone, with photographs that revel in the curve and the line, the sharp edges and deep shadows that make skulls so captivating.

Skulls is as rich and as stark as the bones it holds. There is minimal text. For each skull, we get the basic zoological information and that's it. But that's all that's needed. I find myself drawn in, turning pages, skeletal browsing and brooding a bit. The collection itself presented is intriguing. These are all from the collection of a single man. Alan Dudley has a collection of 2,000 skulls and a passion for collecting that eventually brought him into court with a handful of skulls that had slipped into his possession in breach of international and national law

A reminder not to lose one's own perspective perhaps. But then, open the book and revere the animals brought to you here, through the temples of their bones and be inspired.

 Natural History Book Shop - you could get a copy here

Black Dog and Leventhal - publishers

my own bones tend to end a bit more festive than the beauties in this book

The Grumpy Wizard

apropos of nothing at all....some Year 1 children and I were playing with words, hats and props last week and ended up with an unexpected story poem which was so delightfully silly, I thought we should post it!

The path to the Wizard's house

THE GRUMPY WIZARD

He had a pointy hat

And he had a pointy nose,

He had pointy fingers

And even pointy toes.

He pointed at the girls,

He pointed at the boys,

He worked some nasty magic

And turned them into toys

(not me!)

He took bits of cats,

He took bits of dogs,

He stirred a smelly potion

And turned them into frogs!

(you missed!)

He grabbed his magic wand

And made a fearful spell

There was a bang! and a flash!

But all that came was a smell

(oooo!)

Growing very angry

He grabbed his tall, tough broom

He woke it up with curses

And swept them from the room

(you missed again!)

"No, no, no", he shouted

"I'll get rid of all you lot"

He grabbed a bucket of water

And chased them with his mop

a path runs past the wizard's house 

The children all ran laughing

And up and down the stairs,

They jumped on the wizard's bed,

And played on all his chairs

The wizard started crying

And sat down on a stone,

He said that he was sorry

And didn't want to be alone

The children became his friends

He taught them how to bake

They cooked themselves a feast

With sandwiches, juice and cake

Year 1 (various classes)

Whitefield Infant School

March 2013

the Wizard's house is a ruin now, our story, the children and the wizard himself all long gone

Mountain tales

Mountain tales

a day of storytelling and storymaking in the Cairngorms, 

Sunday April 14th 2013

last year, this little character entertained us

an environment full of starting points

 As part of a weekend of activities on the Wilderness Guide Training Programme, I will be leading a story day at Glenmore Lodge

My day will include chance to:

• experiment with ways of making up stories with groups,   
• using the world around us - the world your wilderness walk has taken you through - to shape new stories         
• draw instant poems from weather, landscape and moment       
• techniques for learning and telling traditional stories

Make the most of those round-the-fire evenings…..

This weekend also includes workshops on natural navigation, astronomy and Scottish geology and landforms by some very exciting workshop leaders. (Watching the rings of Saturn through a  telescope on a cold Cairngorm night was one of my highpoints of last year!)

Each workshop lasts a whole day and you can book in for one day or two - or if you are inspired, perhaps you will do the whole training programme

For booking details and prices contact: http://www.wild-scotland.org.uk/pages/contact-us/

the wider horizon, 2012

Strange recipes and secret places

ready for action

These have been eventful days of workshops all over the place

At St Thomas the Martyr Primary School in Upholland, we've beee looking at "our school" catching the secret life of the school its special places and the unexpected adventures of some of the animals that live around the school. These ideas resolved into pop-up cards and small, secret scenes in boxes...

Then at Coppull Primary School in a whirlwind day of storytelling and storymaking, I encountered a selection of superheroes including Football Boy (he tends to break things) and Skipping Girl (she skips up storms). There were tales of explorers in far flung corners of the globe finding shells, treasures and giant eggs. There were event some rather dubious Year 2's brewing terrible mixtures for our selection of "exciting pots that might be part of a story". I am not sure that we should invite you to sample them, but do try speaking them out loud wiht a certain sense of glee and enjoy the sound and rhythm of our recipes!

1. The King's Cup

to make the Queen happy

Chocolate, cheese and chicken,

Popcorn, pears and potatoes,

Sugar, champagne and shampoo.

Medals, mustard and mayonnaise.

Stir with a ladle for 16 days.

Put in front of the queen and

She'll think its wine.

Dark red like blood.

Green like bogeys

2. The Royal Gravy Pot

 a) Nasty gravy

Bogeys and biscuits,

Earwigs and eggs,

Pooh and pencils,

Ink and ice,

Spit, sparks and spiders,

Stir it up

Heat it gently,

Pour it quickly

Over their dinner

And watch them turn

Into boring books

b) Nice gravy

Pumpkin seeds and pears

Cherries and berries

Golden syrup and grapes

Honey and hot chocolate

Mix it well,

Boil for an hour

and pour it over a pancake

and finally....a beautiful secret scene from St Thomas'

Perfect Park Pizzas

a pizza of sliced flowers for butterflies

In the ongoing delightful craziness that is my work with Whitefield Infant School, the Reception classes had been working on senses and cookery. So when it came time to work with me and visit the lcoal park, we explored Victoria Park as chefs, designing pizzas for the animals (real, hoped for or monstrous) that live there

My brief is to encourage classes to use the local environment and to help inspire language....The poems are the children's own words and images. My job is to shuffle them into an order....I love the language

In the Park

Snow is slowly drifting down.

Falling in the water,

Melting,

Snow pirates sailing on the river

In the cold, cold, freezing cold

Magic flowers are growing,

There are suns made of snow

And stars

And rainbows of snow and ice,

In the cold, cold, freezing cold

Snow butterflies,
And snow trees,

Snow spiders and

Snow birds

In the cold, cold, freezing cold

Icicles grow everywhere

On fingers and noses

And ears and eyes

And faces and eyebrows and chins,

In the cold, cold, freezing cold

Ducks with cold toes are swimming

Racing us round the pond

Hoping for bread

But our pockets are empty,

In the cold, cold, freezing cold

But polar bears are waiting to roar

And penguins are sitting in the penguin houses,

Dinosaurs have snowball fights

And the troll sits in the tunnel waiting for spring

In the cold, cold, freezing cold

And then we got onto the pizzas themselves

a pizza in the park, divided into sections for sharing!

would you like to choose a pizza?

VICTORIA PARK PIZZA

Our pizza smells, of strong green leaves,

muddy brown leaves, red cherries

and blue jellies

Our pizza

Sounds like the wind in the trees, shouting children,

Feet trip trapping through the

Castle tunnel where the monster lives

Our pizza

Has tomato and cheese, mud and mushrooms.

Cheese and chicken and chips, pine cones and pepsi,

Cups and kites, leaves and lentils,

Ducks, pineapples and glass

Our pizza party has

Ladybirds and lions, elephants and owls,

Squirrels, dogs and gingerbread men

Our pizza will

Taste beautiful and wonderful and we

Will need a map to get past the troll

a pizza with fried egg, and handy glue-spreader to help in the eating of it!