Working as a storyteller I am always looking to the future. I have been busy telling stories (Simon James’ Boy from Mars, Jonathan Emmett’s Bringing Down the Moon and Dom Conlon’s Why the Cow Jumped Over the Moon) but having recently reviewed the patterns of my work I know that the autumn and winter could be quiet. I am also aware that having moved out of London to Sussex I am only just beginning to build up the storytelling work I do for organisations in Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire. I therefore find that there is a varied feel to my ongoing commitments. There’s my usual school and library visits but I’m also doing more and more nursery and early years sessions, sessions for older audiences in residential settings and I’m continuing to offer birthday parties. My latest being a mermaid themed birthday storytelling for three and four year olds in a park.
At present my approach to birthday party storytelling is to treat each as a bespoke presentation, tailoring my content to suit each occasion rather than the tried and tested packages I offer schools. Birthdays are the ultimate one shot deal because getting it wrong means spoiling a child’s special day. This particular party was one of my biggest challenges yet. As we were outdoors I had no power and I couldn’t rely on having any other kind of amenities (so no water for my water pistols) so everything had to be pre-prepped – if I couldn’t carry it then I couldn’t use it. The party guests were also relatively young. Whilst I have done a lot of work in nurseries and with little children generally this has been in formal settings rather than parks with all their distractions. Getting and then holding the children’s attention would be hard work if my content missed the mark.
The party was inspired by Maudie Smith’s book “Milly and the Mermaids” a story about a young girl who dreams of meeting a mermaid on a trip to the seaside. We began by creating the setting for our session using a beach towel, some golden sparkly fabric for the sand and colourful cut outs of fish, shells, crabs and starfish. We then used what was on the beach to make sandcastle hat bands (pictured). We used tape rather than glue to hold the hats together and glitter pens to decorate them. When I run birthday parties I like to play party games so I ran some parachute games and we used a picnic basket to play parcel the parcel (instead of prizes the children chose objects that led to rhymes and songs). We used a beautiful blue fabric held up by the parents and bubbles to make a sea that the children could swim through and with a little imagination, some rainbow coloured cloth and a wedge shaped leaf grabber I transformed one of the parents into a mermaid for us to meet! It was all very visual, very colourful and very low tech with a real range of things for the children to do.
I really enjoyed preparing for and delivering this birthday party. It wasn’t storytelling in the manner I’d perhaps normally offer it but my audience had a great time and I got to eat cake! In the last 12 months birthday parties have lead me to create a restaurant murder mystery, a Christmas train adventure and now the seaside in a park; I can’t wait to see where my next party invitation takes me.
When I start searching for a storyteller for my daughter 4th birthday the first name that my web search showed me was the name of John Kirk and now, two months after her birthday, it was the best name that I could get from Google. Since the beginning of our conversation he was very kind and gave me all the information that I needed to know and since the exact moment that I read his first e-mail I knew that I was ‘in good hands’. John make my daughter’s day, and our day as a family, something remarkable, full of joy, music, stories and happy moments and two months later my daughter still talks about that day with sparkle in her eyes. Thank you so much John for being extraordinary!
