Training

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I’ve been working the English Folk Dance and Song Society as part of their project, The Full English. They have recently completely digitising their huge archive and now it is all online – an amazing resource! The Full English includes all sorts of projects in a wide variety of educational settings to celebrate the access and explore different ways of working with the material.
My project was a collaboration with Queensbridge School, musician John Kirkpatrick and mentee, Beth Gifford. All of Year 7 went off timetable for a week to create a performance based on a ballad printed in Birmingham. Six classes concentrated on different aspects of the performance to create an extravaganza including morris dancing, singing, music, storytelling and drama.

If you would like to read a write-up of the project, please click here. Photos coming soon.

Descriptions of the exercises and games used are here

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During the spring term Fiona Collins and I mentored a group of year 9/10 students at Selly Park Technology College preparing them for their Bronze Arts Award.  Over a period of weeks the students explored a variety of storytelling techniques and organised a performance of stories and riddles within school.  The students all came to the Young Storyteller of the Year Competition on 13th March in Birmingham and either performed in the competition or assisted the judges and took part in the deliberation process.  The whole day was brilliant – an excellent opportunity to hear professional storytellers, perform stories in a professional theatres and meet other young people interested in storytelling.  All our students have now successfully acheived their Bronze Arts Award.

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This project took place at the Bridge School with a core group of 14-18 year old students with moderate to severe learning difficulties.  The aim was to create and deliver a project to support students on a creative journey.  One week was used to introduce us as artists and our artforms, to introduce the idea of art as a way to explore and question as well as self-expression, to learn and experiment with a variety of artforms and skills, all through the key media of storytelling and visual art.  A second week focused on our students giving a storytelling performance developed during the first week to groups of primary school children (with a variety of special needs) and mentoring the primary school children on a one to one basis to pass on some of the visual art techniques learned.

This project was a wonderful success according to artists, staff and pupils.  As our key contact, Mandy James, Business and Enterprise Co-ordinator put it:

‘The journey our pupils went on through this project was fantastic.  They were provided with strategies to develop confidence, develop their communication skills and become teachers themselves. These young people will remember this project for a long time.’

For more details about this project please click here:

 

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On Thursday 6th November Fiona Collins and I gave a storytelling workshop to the Stafford and District Early Years Forum

This session was an exciting opportunity to play and have fun!  We have been experimenting with new ideas in the way we approach storytelling to under fives and our biggest discovery has been the use of fruit and vegetables.  With the state of the nation’s health and the English aversion to healthy eating constantly in the news we have been aiming to promote fruit and vegetables and how much fun they can be. 

We have been positively encouraging children to play with their food and using edible puppets as the focus for stories and now it was turn of the adults. 

23 early years practitioners fell upon a rather large fruit bowl and set to work to create an amazing display of characters including a pumpkin cat with pomegranate ears, Surfing Spud, Lucy Leek the scary fairy, a courgette crocodile and a very cool Caribbean coconut.