Stories Alive! Who goes adventuring?

Rosegrove Nursery 

Tuesday 10th March 2015

Who would we take on our adventure? Who should we send on an adventure?

We started with characters, telling instant stories and making up on-the-spot adventures: what if? what might? O dear!

With Stories Alive! different artists are exploring different ways of building stories with young children, and Rosegrove and I are finding ways of improvising stories out of what we can find in the Nursery's grounds and garden

On this cheerful Tuesday, we started with small puppets: as tall as a finger and as brave as lions and we sent them out exploring…

I have a useful set of small character drawings that we sued to get us started. These are simple figures who need faces adding and have hands waiting for bags, lunch boxes, dangerous sticks, footballs, umbrellas, binoculars....

With plates to arrange finds on, we started off asking "what would help our hero on his or her adventure"

twigs for campfires

and throwing at monsters

and tickling trolls,

leaves for blankets

and the walls of houses,

and mud because you should always have some

pinecones are good for throwing at monsters

Looking for those first finds generally then set whole stories in motion as children moved on from that starting point for themselves, adding treasures, finding exciting places to go (someone drowned in the quicksand of the sandpit where for others the dinosaurs lived) and risking life, limb and cardboard to bravely balance on logs or climb giant jungle bushes

These were short sessions, revolving around making our puppets, finding useful things and talking about them. We recorded discoveries quickly with pictures and small finds on long storyboards and groups told their stories back to each other again before they went home

(photos: more pictures are pending - waiting for a chance to check with families as to which ones we can show - they'll come in after the holidays)

Next time:  who lives behind this door? Or that door? Or the scary one over there in the roots of the tree....

small pirates are
always useful!

Stories Alive! has placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire with the challenge of developing 5 different sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are working with