Our role in this project has been to deliver educational sessions to the two primary schools in Cullompton, St Andrews and Willowbank. It was a lot of fun planning and delivering the sessions, and we had to adapt our content to deliver to different age groups (Y2 at St Andrews and Y5/6 at Willowbank).
Each day started with an introduction to the history of Cullompton, starting with the Romans and working through King Alfred, the emergence of the town as a trading centre and the relative affluence of medieval Cullompton. We really wanted the children to think about their connection to the town, so we set them a craft task to design their own coat of arms. This was inspired by the coats of arms we had spotted in the Walronds:
Next it was story time, and we started with Kev’s Gory Story – the Tale of Tom Austin. This was sanitised for the audience somewhat, but you can hear an unabridged version of the story of this most murderous highwayman on our podcast. We then moved on to tell the entertaining tale of the Fire of Cullompton, which became a loud and lively performance including all the children who played the various roles with great enthusiasm. We shouted directions above the clamour and spent our weekends recovering with throat medicine.
Back in the classroom it was time for the children to retell the story themselves, often with their own individual twists involving aliens or Superman. We encouraged this: the best stories have a life of their own and grow with each telling. As the sessions went on we got more innovative with this ideas and we came up with the idea of the Peg Theatre. Children took on all the roles that you might have in a real performance – we had set designers, directors, scriptwriters and costume-makers – but the actual acting was done by decorated pegs. This facilitated more enthusiastic performances, as the audience was watching the peg characters and not the children!
We thoroughly enjoyed our time at the primary schools – thank you to all the staff and especially the children who greeted us with such enthusiasm.