Goodman
Gretel wants to live in a better world. She dreams of her perfect place -a Utopia to hope for. This piece of spoken word incorporating song, was inspired by ideas gathered in workshops gather with children and their families over 2022.
A Utopian world building workshop is available to book exploring children’s identity and values and Fantasy and Science Fiction Genres. You can read more about workshops here.
Informed by ideas gathered in workshops with young people and children, Red: A Dystopian Fairy Tale is a spoken word piece about an imagined futuristic world ruled by a totalitarian regime known as Mother.
A world building workshop is available to book exploring Dystopian fiction. You can read more about workshops here.
nce, three unlikely friends lived in the hollow of a tree – a mouse, a bird and a sausage. They lived happily in their home, each with their own tasks to keep their home happy.
It was Bird’s job to fetch the twigs for their small fire. It was Mouse’s job to keep their home swept and clear of spiders and cobwebs. It was Sausage’s job to make their dinner. He would stir the pot and then he would go for a swim through the dinner to add flavour.
One day, Bird got to thinking about the different jobs that they all did. Mouse only had to sweep the floor once a day and all Sausage did was go for a swim through the pot and stand there stirring. Meanwhile the bird had to fly through the forest all day to collect twigs and carry them home. It didn’t seem fair that she had to constantly come and go while the others did very little.
Bird complained to her housemates that she felt she worked harder then the others. Mouse and Sausage did not want their friend to be unhappy. They agreed to swap jobs. Sausage would go and fetch the twigs, Mouse would make the dinner and Bird would sweep the floor.
Bird was happy this. She felt she had gone from the hardest job to the easiest.At the start of a new day she swept the floor. Seeing that her job was done she decided to go for a nap. It wold seem that frustrations had taken its toll and she slept all day.
Meanwhile Sausage, had headed out of there hollow and into the woods. He felt great to be away from the host stove and he enjoyed looking at the forest and all of its wonders. He smelt great. So great that his smell filled the forest and snuck into the nose of a nearby fox. The fox followed the scent trial over and under logs until Sausage came in sight. As Sausage bent down to pick up a fallen twig, the fox leapt out from behind a bush and swallowed Sausage down in one noise gulp. That was the end of Sausage.
Meanwhile back at home Mouse had been making the dinner, just as she had seen Sausage do. She chopped up the vegetables, just as she had seen Sausage do. She slid the vegetables into the boiling pot of water, just as she had seen Sausage do. She stirred and stirred all day long, enjoying making food for her friends, just as she had seen Sausage do. And just like Sausage, she dived into the boiling pot to add flavour. Unlike Sausage, she could not swim and the heat was too much for her small fragile body. She drowned in the dinner. That was the end of Mouse.
When Bird woke it was dark and the house was quiet. The fire had gone out and the dinner was cold. She scoffed. Clearly Sausage and Mouse were not up to the tasks that they had taken on. She waited. A long time. The whole night through. And as the night wore on, she started to worry. Why was the home in the tree hollow so empty? So quiet? So friendless? Where were Mouse and Sausage?
Bird decided to clean up. After all that was her job now and it turned out that a lot of spiders wanted to make the Hollow the home so she swept the cobwebs away and shooed the spiders back outside. Sh thought she had better clean up after dinner. So she went to empty the pot and there curled up in a little ball was her dear friend mouse. Bird understood what had happened. Then she worried about Sausage where was he? Why wasn’t he home?
So now she flies from tree to tree searching for her friend Sausage, skittish and cross with herself for being such an ungrateful fool.
I have been working with Z-Arts and Crumpsall Lane Primary School in Manchester, creating story telling pieces for the schools reception class. Its been really wonderful and tomorrow we go into our third week of the project based on the collections of Brother’s Grimm, and this week we are looking at Little Red Riding Hood or as Bro
ther’s Grimm called Little Red Cap.
This story has been re told and re told and re told, and I have a strong suspicion that the children will be very familiar with it. I think that each week they have bought there own colour and magic to the stories we have looked at (Musicians of Bremen and Hansel and Gretel.) That is why working with these traditional stories is such a gift because they can be re told in so many different ways. As a story teller, I love the immediacy of the retelling. The audience being very active in shaping how the story looks and feels. These stories are so beautifully simple but it is quite easy to overlook them.
I also provide lesson plans in arts crafts for further exploration of these stories in the class in the week that follows. I’d thought I’d pass on one of the craft exercises in this weeks lesson plan. You can never have too many resources available!
First things first, copy the above template for each of the components in the mask and cut them out. I made the mistake of putting it all together before I coloured it in, which made it much harder to build, the above image is on an A4 piece of paper. You could print it directly onto card if you’d prefer. An extra task for the children , could be to draw around pre cut provided templates and see if they could get them to fit it onto a sheet of A4 card.
The decorating is worth spending time on as the masks look so much better as a result. I kept my decoration very simple and only used felt tip, but I think the mask would come alive even further with some fake fur or felt or if the teeth were very shiny….
Stick the front and the back thin pieces together. I used masking tape to stick the pieces together, that way I can adjust easily to the circumference of head that is resting on. I then
took the nose piece and folded along each of the dotted lines.
I attached part one, by folding over the top of the front piece of headband in the middle of the ears and secured with tape.
I then attached the mouth piece behind section 2 of the nose and then the tongue behind the mouth.
Nice and straight forward. Now you can howl at the moon and be big, bad and scary!
Be sure to Tweet or Instagram the results!
Goodman 