Third Group - Final Session

Third Group - Final Session

So... here it is... the last session of this learning process.

It was the large group again, with all the familiar faces, so I was glad I had managed to find new stories for them.

First I introduced a new magic story sound - from a lovely, small, odd-shaped gong a friend had made for me. It has a beautiful ringing throb that I love.

 The children loved it too.

Then, into the stories, starting with The Old Woman and her Pig - an old traditional tale that can be found in the Joseph Jacobs collections amongst many other places. I remember loving it as a child, even though the book I had then included the gory bits with the butcher, the hanged man and the rat. For this audience I adapted the story to miss out all that stuff and the sequence went: pig, dog, stick, fire, water, horse, horse-fly, spider, cat, milk, cow, hay. The sequence was, perhaps, a little too long. It held their attention up to the horse, but then some became fidgety and the rest of it was hard to get across.

As expected, there then came the familiar demand for Mighty Mouse... but I was prepared. I repeated the section from last week - Mighty Mouse and the Lion, as some of the children had missed it, and then added a version of another Aesop Fable, The Bull and the Mouse, with Mighty Mouse teasing the bull - and continued with my own addition - Mighty Mouse and the Elephant, in which the now over-confident and cheeky Mighty Mouse teases the elephant, eventually running up inside his trunk to nip the inside of his nose. this was popular, but, again, just a little bit too long. I must learn to be happy with shorter tales.

Another of Papa Joe's tales came next, Pocamondas, about a little boy making stupid mistakes. This worked well even though some of the children were getting tired and distracted.

And then I made a mistake... instead of finishing at that point, I allowed myself to be persuaded to tell another story. I chose the old joke, The Wide Mouthed Frog. At first it went fairly well with those children who were still enjoying the stories. But others had had enough and I wasn't able to reach the end. I still have much to learn but I have gone as far as I can with this group.