Rainbows and Dragons Workshops

The workshop has been running at The Play Station Eastbourne – unfortunately the workshops will not be running for a while as there was not enough interest in them. I will post the dates and venues of any workshops I run in the future on this page. Hopefully we will be up and running again soon.

click the picture for the address

If you have enjoyed coming to the workshop with your children then please tell your friends about it. You can still put your name down if you are interested in a future workshop and if I get enough interest I will contact you. Feel free to email me to put your name or child’s name down for future workshops at laura.crean@yahoo.co.uk

I still may offer one off holiday workshops so keep checking in…

To book a place for a child or if you are a school and would like to book a workshop – phone 07999 475019 or email laura.crean@yahoo.co.uk

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There are 2 different types of children’s workshops – Toddler Workshops, which involve stories with puppets and props, Early Years music activities with singing, puppets, instruments and movement, and crafts with Early Years themes linked to the stories and music. At the moment it is only crafts and stories but I hope to offer a proper music session in the future. If you would like to put your child’s name down for a music session let me know.

School age – After school, Lunchtime and Holiday workshops for toddlers to year 6 children (although teenage siblings and parents seem to get involved with the activities too – and they can be just as creative! ) with a focus on character and world building through creative writing, story planning and crafts. At the present these are running alongside the Toddler sessions with extra creative writing and crafts available for the older children. For an idea of how the sessions would run as school club sessions, see the examples below. For the time being the sessions are pay on the door at the play centre, so they will be stand alone activities rather than activities that run over a longer period. If you are a school or venue that would like to offer termly sessions please let me know.

There may be some cross over of activities between the workshops, as I will always cater for the children’s ages and abilities. There will be opportunities to do the simpler craft activities or more challenging ones – including creative writing – depending on what your child shows an interest and ability in.

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More about the workshops…

Why Story ‘Craft’?

This workshop is for all children who have a big imagination and who love story-telling; whether that is through creative writing, art, illustration and crafts or role-play, imaginative play and construction play.

These workshop sessions are jam packed with all of the above. They are designed to be creative, imaginative and fun, and they are a great way for children to express their imagination and creativity with character and world building through play and crafts, creative-writing and sharing their ideas with friends. These sessions are about having fun, playing, drawing, making, writing and telling stories in a relaxed and comfortable stress-free environment.

The Toddler Group – These baby and toddler sessions are all about fostering a love of stories, music and art from the word go. As an author, artist and former Nursery Nurse I have always loved story-telling in all its forms – from writing and illustrating poetry and stories, art and design, role play and imaginative play and music that can be used to tell a story. I just love to be creative and use my imagination and in my experience so do most children.

These sessions are a unique opportunity for you and your baby/toddler/pre-school child/ren to be a part of a group that will meet every week to listen to stories told by a published children’s author. With puppets and props, songs and nursery rhymes, instruments and crafts (yes even the babies – they love to hear stories and learn to love music, books and mark making, crafts and messy play from a very early age). As an adult you will enjoy the company and learn lots of rhymes and songs that you can continue to sing at home, as well as helping your child to make simple puppets, instruments and crafts with Early Years, story and music themes that they can take home and enjoy.

You and your children will also be able to read, enjoy and borrow the books in the Rainbows and Dragons library, play with the imaginative toys and puppets and puppet theatres and make friends. This really is a great Baby and pre-school group to belong to.

One of the ‘travelling theme’ crafts

There was an opportunity for children to have a go at sewing with these rainbow trains – someone has even tried to colour this engine in to give it a little more decoration!

I particularly love the way the black crayon in this train colouring looks like a smoky steam coming from the train’s funnel – so creative.

School Age Workshops

The Holiday Workshops were originally designed to run as an after school club but unfortunately this has not taken off as well as I would have liked, so these types of activities are now running as part of the Holiday workshop. If you are a school in Eastbourne and the surrounding areas and would like to offer a one off workshop or some regular workshops at lunchtime, after school or in the school holidays let me know – they would run something like this:-

Session one – meet and greet introductions and exploring story-telling genres.

In the first session we will be talking about why we love stories, sharing our favourite stories and characters and exploring different ways to tell stories. This is a good way for the children to get to know each other and share their interests as well as learning about different genres and different story-telling styles without realising they are learning.

Maybe your child loves reading and writing poetry or short stories, maybe they are a movie buff or love comic books or Manga cartoons and love to draw their own cartoon characters, or maybe they love creating with Lego, plasticine or the new computer craze Minecraft, like my daughter. Maybe they love photography and movie-making. Whatever their interests and ways to enjoy storytelling, in this session we will introduce ourselves, share our ideas and interests and talk about what creative things we will be doing in the next sessions.

The children will receive their own story-telling scrap book to decorate as well as a “Super Hero Profile” sheet to fill in to tell everybody why they are a Hero.

Sessions two, three and four – story planning, characters, setting and plot, leading into Super Hero comic-strip project.

In these sessions we will be talking about story planning. Using the questions, who? Where? What? Why? and When? We will talk about planning characters, settings and plot. These questions and aspects of story planning will be used throughout the rest of the workshop sessions. We will then start to look at who? in more detail through character building, by looking back at our own Superhero profiles from the last session and then designing super hero and villain characters to use in a comic strip. We will design and draw our super heroes and their costumes, logos, masks and look at powers and characteristics. We will also design onomatopoeic words like POW, ZAP, BANG, etc. to use in our comic strips. Next we will plan our Super Hero comic-strip stories and finally create them. We will put all our comic-strip stories together into one comic book that the children can take home and share with their family and friends.

Sessions five and six and a take home idea – exploring the sci-fi genre, alien character ‘building’ with plasticine.

Moving on from comic-strips, we will talk about how comic-strip type stories can be represented through cartoons and animation and give the children an idea about how stop-frame animation works. We will be designing our own plasticine aliens and then creating and playing with them, seeing how they might be able to move and show emotions and give the illusion of life through animation. We will design our own alien world ‘stage’ setting with cereal boxes so that we can put our characters into their setting. This explores the question where? or ‘world building’. We will play around with our characters and see what stories we can craft with them and then represent these stories as a storyboard.

The children can take their aliens and planet scenes home and continue with their ‘play’ and storyboard cartoon. If they are feeling really clever and can find some parents to help they could take photos of their aliens and create a real-life stop-frame animation with photos over a weekend or school holiday. If the children bring the photos back to me on a named USB stick I can turn them into a movie (Be aware though, you will need a LOT of photos if you want a decent length movie LOL). If enough children get involved with this, I can put all their movies together into one film to share with their friends and family.

Sessions seven and eight – continuing with the sci-fi genre and crafting robots

In these sessions we will continue with the science-fiction theme, looking at the different ways science is used to create stories, concentrating on artificial intelligence or ‘robots’. We will talk about where we have seen robots used in stories and films, what they can do and then design our own. Then we will make our own robot characters out of junk modelling materials and the children can write a short story or poem about their character if they would like.

Sessions nine, ten and eleven – fairy-tale and fable genre. Character building with puppets.

In these sessions we will start to explore puppets and talk about how puppets have been used by story-tellers throughout history. We will concentrate on the ‘Fairy-Tale and Fable genre’ and will be designing our own finger puppets and making a felt ‘play scene’ for our puppets to live in when they are not being played with. We will use a story plan sheet to plan our stories, play around with the puppets and perform our puppet plays to each other.

If the children continue with the workshops into the next term we will be making hand puppets and building a puppet theatre to perform in. We will also make shadow puppets and clothes peg puppets with a slot together castle. After that we will move on to the mystery genre.