Category Archives: For Schools

Nonsense at Wakefield Literature Festival & Nursery Rhymes with Monsieur le Fou on European Languages Day

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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About a month ago I was invited to perform both my “Jabberwocky!” and “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” suitcase shows as part of Wakefield Literature Festival for a Toddler group at Wakefield Grammar School Foundation, (Mulberry House).  The shows went down very well with the adults, the babies and the toddlers as well.  You can see from the photo’s that some of the children took me up on the offer of a “behind the scenes tour”, letting them get a closer look at the puppets.

Camilla Field, (Director of Marketing for Wakefield Grammar School Foundation) was good enough to take all the photographs you see on this post.

As it was European Languages Day and Camilla had asked if we had anything suitable for the Pre-prep children in the afternoon.  So Leo Nolan (a long term collaborator and founder member of Midland Red Theatre Co. and Rough Magic Theatre) and myself put on a little show called “Nursery Rhymes with Monsieur le Fou” (CLICK HERE for Leo’s website).  Leo plays Monsieur le Fou, a very silly French man who teaches the children Nursery Rhymes in French, and I play Miss Construed who is British and interprets between him and the children in the audience.  We look at saying Hello, Incy Wincy Spider and Little Miss Muffet as well as indulging in a spot of birthday cake baking for Miss Muffet’s Birthday.  This provides the opportunity to look at various animal and food names along the way.

 

 

If you would like to Book “Nursery Rhymes with Monsieur le Fou” or either of my Shadow Puppet Suitcase shows then please CLICK HERE to contact me.

The children’s animal costumes, honey pot, eggs and basket were created by Joy Nolan-Evans.  CLICK HERE to see more of her work on her new blog

“The Interrupted Wedding” Shadow Show goes to Ladybarn Primary School

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Hello again everybody.  Sorry to have gone a bit quiet for a while. This January I have been mostly attending lots of networking meetings, making plans for the year etc.  So I thought I’d wait till I had something a bit more exciting to blog about.

Last week though I visited Ladybarn Primary School in Manchester.  The Year 2s were doing a project called Puppets & Magic.  The teachers planned to make hand puppets out of felt with the children and wanted them to be inspired by seeing some professionally made puppets. So I performed our Shadow Puppet Show “The Interrupted Wedding” and did a bit of a lecture demonstration looking at different types of puppet from around the world and some of the history etc.  Then I showed the children some performance techniques and then the children played with different types of puppets themselves. “The Interrupted Wedding” is performed using an umbrella for a shadow screen and is a show we use for parties as well as in schools. The show went down extremely well with the children who really enjoyed the story.  This story is an original one written by Rough Magic Theatre’s own Tim Austin.  It is always nice when children tell you they have enjoyed something without being prompted.  In my experience children give very honest reactions compared to adults who might want to be polite and spare your feelings. They also seemed to particularly enjoy seeing some of the puppets from other Rough Magic Theatre productions that I brought in for them to see.  There were 2 rod puppets from our version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, (Stephano and Caliban), the “Pig/Baby” double ended “mouth” puppet  from Alice in Wonderland and the Bunraku style Alice puppet with real hair, (which came off my own head).  The Alice puppet is fun to show how she works as you can see all her insides by lifting up her dress, (kids always find that kind of thing funny) and then of course her head can be removed to show the hand control.  Seeing the Alice puppet’s body without its head is also something children appreciate a lot! The next school we are visiting is in Keighley where we will be doing our “Hansel & Gretel” show and doing a shoe-box toy theatre workshop.  You can read about this workshop in an earlier blog post HERE. If you are interested in booking any of the above shows or workshops please get in contact.  Click HERE to get in touch.