Making stories

Sharing stories connects us
-and is really lovely too!

Stories are such an important part of life, one friend puts it that it is our stories that connects us. We read them to our children to teach them lessons, to understand how different aspects of life work and to explore new ideas. We read them to ourselves to escape, imagine and comfort. I have the same stories that I re-read whenever I feel low or insecure that always help me to rebalance and gain perspective. 

Young authors at work

Collaborating with Kalahwood has been a great experience as we help young authors to create their own stories and illustrations to be published, if they want. Over the last term we helped 8 children ranging from 5 years to 10 years create stories which are on the way to being published and this past week we have worked with 5  children to make their own stories a reality. They arrived on Monday with nothing.. well, 4 of them did. One young man, who I can already picture becoming a household name before he reaches my age, had already got a well written story though he decided to edit it over the week to make it shorter with more space for pictures. However from nothing at the beginning of the week, they left on Friday having captured stories from the air (I almost see it like the BFG capturing dreams ) creating characters, adventures and the illustrations to go with them. They managed over 5 mornings what it takes many authors years to do!

The story that inspired the Honeycomb
Kalahwood partnership. 

All of the creativity and writing games we have been playing have led into my own life and with the boys we have started a new game that has slightly taken over any spare moments we have! And the best bit? You don’t need anything to play except your voice. We have played sitting round the table after tea, while tidying up the studio at the hub, in the car and even in the Drs waiting room waiting for a not very well big one to be diagnosed with Tonsillitis!

The Story game

One person starts the story with a few words or sentence, and then the next person continues it and so on around the group. To prompt my younger one (he’s just 3 years) I sometimes try to end my sections of story with words that hint at a next part for example: when suddenly, who was, accompanied by. However, though I may have a plan in my head for what he could say, it rarely happens that way! I might say “the boy walked along the forest path with….” Assuming my son might name a new character or maybe something the boy was carrying and he says “a bouncy, bouncy walk.” Our stories take many surprising twists and turns. We have had sliding down rainbows, flying cars, all manner of superheroes yet in nearly all our stories a wolf has featured. Perhaps this shows which fairytales I retell most often!

The other day I recorded a couple of the stories we made together and here they are in all their glorious craziness.

Tiger in the jungle

1.       A tiger

2.       Was prowling through the jungle

3.       And then he saw a wolf and ‘prowled’* to the moon

1.       Tigers and lions and tigers and lions jumped over the gate and house

2.       The person who lived in the house was not very happy to see all these tigers and lions

3.       And so he hit them with a fly swat! The end!

*My son explained that no he didn’t mean howled and that prowling to the moon was a very special type of howling.

Supercat

1.       One sunny morning there was a superhero cat and it jumped over a wall

2.       As it jumped, it took flight and started to zoom through the skies

3.       Spiderman, spiderman dog, spiderman cat, spiderman bike, spiderman car drove over the box

1.         And then spirderman met a bad spiderman called Mr Licky Tongue and he whacked them with his tongue

2.         Just then supercat zoomed by and saw that spiderman needed a bit of help so…

3.         Spiderman, spiderman dog, spiderman cat, spiderman bike, spiderman car drove over a car

1.         Then that silly car smashed onto spiderman

2.         Supercat saw that there was nothing else he could do and so he went home for tea where he ate

3.         I don’t know

1.         I know! He ate supermince

2.         Supermince on toast with

3.         Beans

2.         And for dessert he had

1.         cat liquid – which is very yummy! The end.

The deep dark wood

             1.       In the deep dark woods there lived two witches

             2.       And they had a pet wolf called Tracker

             3.       They made a potion

1.    Into their cauldron they put

2.    Mummies

3.    And beans

1.    They gave it a big stir and then they added

2.    Caramel milk

3.    Put juice in it

1.    Once it was bubbling nicely they sprinkled in some magical herbs which turned it

2.    A pinky orange

3.    They put spiderman in

1.    Then they decided to feed their potion to

2.    Their wolf

3.    He ate it

2.    And he lived forever and so he never died. The end.

Yes, these stories are bonkers and do not make much sense. But the laughter they generated and the time we spent talking together inspiring creativity was awesome. And this is an easy time filler when you are caught out without a book or toy in your bag without having to resort to the universal screen-time babysitter of a phone… unless you want to record some of the stories and I would love to hear some of them if you do!