So many strange and different habits have formed through lockdown, keeping 2 metres apart, not leaving the house unless we really have to, no school, no going to work, zoom… so much zoom… family quizzes, one way systems in supermarkets, toilet roll stockpiling, and face masks!
We want you to tell us your lockdown story. It doesn’t need to be an epic, it could be three lines.
Tell us about something you’ve done that you’d never done before, tell us about forgetting to social distance, tell us a story that we can keep, that we can look back on in a years time and remember how truly weird and strange all this has been.
How about answering these questions, they may give you an idea…
What have you cancelled?
Have you had a birthday or milestone during lockdown?
What are you missing?
What did you do out of sheer boredom?
What have you tried that you’ve never done before?
We will use the stories in our devising and scripting and who knows, maybe your story will form part of our bigger tale.
How you tell it is up to you, you can write it down, you can draw it, if you can’t express it in words make us a mood board of your lockdown, what colour is it? What images sum it up?
When an artist has an idea or is asked to create something, be it a written piece or something visual like a set or lighting design, they often start by collecting all their ideas into one place.
This place could be a sketch or note book, a moodboard or storyboard. It depends entirely on what the artist is trying to create and the way they prefer to work. No path is wrong if it leads you to where you want to be.
A collection of sketchbooks with written and drawn ideas. The beauty of having your ideas recorded is that you will never forget them and even if you don’t develop them straight away, they are there for the future.
Two different mood boards. The first board shows a collection of inspiring images gathered together and the second board shows colours, materials and a sample of how the final piece may be made.
Storyboards – like this one from Roger Mason – work rather like a comic strip to tell your story visually, they are used in film making to decide what the audience should see in a scene. They are effective when writing a visual piece without much dialogue.
Your challenge for this week – Show us a creative idea you’ve had using one of the methods mentioned. Your idea could be a story with a scene breakdown drawn or written on a storyboard or perhaps you want to redesign your bedroom on a mood board, showing colours, furniture and patterns you like.
Whatever way you feel is the best way to tell your creative idea, we’d love to see it!
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
We loved your hoax fairies from challenge six so much that we’ve decided to explore the theme further. Here’s a link to the original challenge to refresh your memory.
There’s two ways you could explore this theme: either by looking at the fantastical or by investigating the hoax element, things like trickery and April fools. Perhaps you could combine the two or retell an old fairy tale in your own way.
Once you’ve decided your theme, think about your next steps. Are you going to write a story, song or poem, will you make a puppet or drawing? Perhaps you might like to make more hoax photographs or a short film about a trick going wrong? You could create your own fantasy world by drawing a map and filling it with places like enchanted forests and spooky castles. The choice is yours!
You can create a puppet by drawing or cutting out the shapes of each limb and then attach with Split pins.
However you want to investigate the theme please let us see your work and remember that whatever way you choose to get creative, be safe!
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Following on from the Voices Challenge, we’d really like to explore your likes and dislikes further. Begin by making a list – it’s best to try and think of original ideas rather than listing the usual answers.
Ask yourself, “What are my favourite things and what brings happiness into my life?” And next, “What do I dislike or even hate?”
Your answers could be things like a taste, an activity, animals, foods, colours, places, the sound something makes, a texture or pattern? Remember originality will create better and more interesting results. We hope to develop this challenge further, into a film, performance or artwork of some kind so the more quality answers we get, the better it will be.
Now you have your list, decide on how you will present it. You may want to divide a piece of paper in two and simply write or draw your answers using one half of the paper for likes and the other half for dislikes. Or you might like to compose a song or write a poem for us. A short film, a collage, a puppet show or a sculpture of some kind. It’s up to you! Just have fun, stay safe and please let us see your results.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
This challenge is to design and make your own board game. Start by thinking of a theme, it could be film, a favourite walk, climbing a tree, a trip to space, a haunted house – anything that sparks your imagination.
Next draw your board design by making a path for your counters to travel. You need to include:
A start and finish.
Obstacles to avoid such as miss a turn or move back 3 spaces. These are like the ‘snakes’ in Snakes and Ladders or the ‘go to jail’ in Monopoly.
And spaces that reward the player eg: move forward 2 spaces or take an extra turn.
Once you’re happy with your design you can collect some counter pieces from around your home or garden. You could use painted pebbles, small toy figures, Lego bricks, drawn characters or whatever you want. So long as they all look different and fit on the board it’s fine.
You will also need a dice or some way of telling the player how many spaces to move – numbers picked from a hat works just as well as throwing a dice.
Congratulations you are now the inventor of a board game. I wonder if it will become as famous as Monopoly! Enjoy playing it and we’d love to see your design.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Using a recording app say and finish the following sentences…
I’m really missing…
I’m looking forward to…
I really like…
The best thing that happens in my day is…
I wouldn’t be able to get through this without…
When everything gets back to normal, I’m going to…
Once you have recorded your voice please send us your sounds to the uploader below
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Cut equal lengths of card approximately 1cm wide. Smaller globes will need around 10 strips of card and larger globes will need 12 – 15. The more strips you add, the more solid your globe will be but the harder it will be to open up.
Punch a hole at the two ends of each cardboard strip. Please do NOT use the split pins to make the holes, it is dangerous and won’t work well.
Join the strips together with a split pin. Attach one end at a time.
Once all strips are secured at both ends, gently open your globe by arranging the strips side by side.
Why not try using different materials such as recycled plastic and cartons. You can also experiment with different repeat patterns or you could draw a picture onto the card before you cut it into strips. This method would make a jigsaw globe.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Now summer is getting closer and the days are warmer, we would like you to share some of your pictures of nature with us.
Maybe something is growing in the garden? maybe something is nesting in your eaves, do you see some awesome trees, or some ducks on your walks or bike rides? if you do share them with us. We’d love to see what you see every day.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Your new challenge is to design your very own Coat of Arms. A Coat of Arms is a heraldic emblem that represents a place, organisation or name. Perhaps your family already has a Coat of Arms. You can find out by searching your surname on the internet.
A good starting point is to think about what makes you special. What do you love? What are you good at? Perhaps you have a favourite animal, sport, place or food that could become the main centrepiece. Make a list to help you and remember that there are no wrong answers.
Next decide what shape your Coat of Arms will be? Many are shield shaped but yours can be whatever you want. You could draw around a plate to get you started.
Once you have drawn your Coat of Arms you can pick your own inspiring motto to include on your design and don’t forget to use your favourite colours to colour it in. Most of all, have fun and please let us see your creations via our link.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Once you send them to us we will use of them to make a new song.
You can clap 4 times, you can shout 4 times, you can bang a pan, you can tap the table, you can say 1,2,3,4!
Mix it up and clap tap clap tap, you can say a word four times you can say four words, all we want is four beats.
Once you’ve found them, record them. Sound recording apps on your phones, voice memo apps, you can make a video for the sound alone, use whatever you can to record them and send them to us
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Hello Everyone, Here’s another activity to try if you want to beat the boredom. We’re asking you to draw a recipe for us. You could even make your recipe and let us see the results.
Above is a drawn recipe by Sophie Peanut. If you want to see more of her fantastic work, follow the link below. There’s also loads of inspiration on Pinterest.
As well as the cooking information you could add special ingredients like love and kindness plus drawings of family members, pets and other important things.
If your recipe looks tasty we may even try it ourselves!Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
We want your funniest jokes today, or best funny stories. They don’t have to be your joke, just one that you find funny.
From knock, knock! To Doctor, Doctor, to someone slipping on a banana skin, anything that you makes you laugh.
Once you’ve decided on your favourite (or a few)
Send them to us and give us a good chuckle
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Hello Everyone, we hope you’re all keeping safe and well. Today’s challenge is to turn your day into a storyboard / comic strip. We want to see an illustrated ‘day in the life of YOU!’
Drawings are ideal or you can get really creative with collaged pictures or puppets posed for photographs. The choice is yours! Text is also allowed if you want to add a short explanation about each scene or speech / thought bubbles.
Be as detailed as you wish but we need at least 6 clearly marked scenes from your day.
Good luck! We can’t wait to see what you come up with.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Since we’ve had to stay indoors more, lots of people have started to make wish lists of what they are missing and what they’d like to do after they are allowed to go out again.
If you haven’t already you can get an old jar and start putting in your ideas on little bits of paper, then when you can you can take the papers out one by one and do all the things you are missing.
We’d like you to share some of your slips of paper with us and tell us what you are missing at the moment, what you’d like to do as soon as you can. Maybe its to visit a relative, maybe its a kick about with your mates or maybe you just want to hang out with people again.
Please share some of your ideas with us, you can film yourself or you can write them in a document, either way we want to hear from you.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Drawing around hands is something we all learn to do when we are very young. Even prehistoric people used their hands as stencils to make their cave paintings; Many can still be seen today, thousands of years after they were made.
Artist Mark Wallinger has used these cave paintings to inspire his challenge to us all. Here’s the link if you want to read the original article.
He suggests we all draw around our hands and decorate them to hang in our windows. He hopes it will make a collective community wave and become a gesture of contact to the outside world.
So why not have a go?
Draw, cut, decorate and hang. It couldn’t be simpler!
Please share your work with us
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Whether it’s one you’ve written yourself, or one you’ve read recently, or one you can remember but just love, we want you to tell us a story.
Film it, record your voice, make some drawings from it, however you want to tell us the story, get the words down and share it with us.
If you do film your story on a phone, turn it sideways so that the final film fills a TV screen, this is called Landscape.
Landscape (turn your phone sideways)Portrait means we have to cut bits out to fill the screen
If you are struggling to find books to read lately, have you tried borrow box? if you have a membership to the library you can use it to access free downloadable books and audio books. There’s lots to choose from, so have a look.
Happy reading, and we hope to hear your stories soon.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Today’s challenge is Paper bunting. You can use whatever shapes you want in whatever paper you can find. Perhaps you could make a string of bunting as a gift for someone to cheer them up during this difficult time.
Step 2. Collect different papers together but please ask before you cut them up! Old maps, music sheets, magazines, pictures you’ve made, wrappers etc are all good to use. Think about what colours are best for your chosen theme.
Step 3. Draw and cut out your shapes. They can be all different or all the same.
Step 4. String your collection of shapes together by taping thread to the back of each one. Fishing line, string, cotton or wool all work well. If you wanted to, you could sew the thread through each shape with a sewing needle. This can be tricky so ask for help if you need it.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
let’s have some fun, and find out some more about you.
You can film your answers, you can record them or you can just type them up and send them to us. But here are ten things we’d love to know
1. How are you?
2. What are you up to today?
3. What is your favourite food, what is the best meal you’ve ever had?
4. What song or what music always makes you stop and listen because you love it so much?
5. Where would you most like to visit? Where would you most like to be right now?
6. What was the last thing you watched? How was it?
7. If you were cooking for the whole family, what would you make?
8. Do you like your popcorn sweet or salted? if not popcorn, what do you go for?
9. What is your favourite word, what word do you think you say most often?
10. What Question would you ask? answer it for yourself.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
1.Start by drawing an egg onto your cardboard, now cut in half with a zig zag line.
2. Draw and cut out your chick, making sure it will fit in your egg. Perhaps you could make a Bunny, Alien or Monster instead of a chick?
3. Decorate with anything you want: pens, paint, collage, googly eyes etc.
4. Once dry, join your egg together with a split pin or some string. Be careful when making the holes!
5. Finally glue your Chick or other creature inside.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
We want to know more about you and your family, who do you live with? What do they do when they aren’t at home with you? What do they like, can they cook, are they funny?
This challenge is to interview a family member or more than one, ask them the burning questions you’ve always wanted to know, or get them to tell you some of their stories.
As usual we want you to share the results with us, you can write down your interviews like in a magazine, or you can film them on your phone, or you can record them like a radio interview. We want pictures to go with them too!
Matty, Kate, Nancy and Penny, from Phill’s family
Good luck and happy interviewing!
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Here is a film we made from the content you sent us, many thanks
here is a gallery that Michael created of his fairy and alien encounters
In 1917 two cousins named Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith took five photographs showing images of real life Fairies! The pictures shocked the world and were believed to be proof that Fairies truly are ‘at the bottom of the garden’.
The Cottingley Fairy photos, named after the place they were taken, fooled many people. The author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an avid believer in the pictures. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that they admitted they were fakes and that the ‘Fairies’ were in fact cardboard cutouts.
Your challenge is to make your own hoax photograph or film. Think Fairies, U.F.Os, Spooks and Monsters. Let your imagination and creativity run wild! Perhaps dress up a family member or make a model, it’s up to you. Just have fun and please send us your results – we can’t wait to see them.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Do you have a pet? More than one? Cat, dog, goldfish, a painted rock that you take everywhere with you?
We’d love to find out more about your pets, tell us their name, age, what you love about them, show us some pictures or take a bit of video of your pet going about their day.
How you choose to share with us is up to you, a voice recording, a written account, drawings or photographs.
Phill’s cat Mia
if you don’t have a pet, tell us why, and tell us, if you would like one, what it would be and what you’d do together.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Here is a film we made with the content yo sent us, many thanks.
As people are social distancing, some have decided to place rainbows in their windows so that young children out for walks and exercise can spot them and count how many they see as they go.
Therefore, the next challenge is to make a rainbow. You can use whatever you like or have hanging around to make it, if it’s able to fit in your window or attach to it all the better, have fun with it and send us the results
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
This is a story challenge, we will start it and we want to tell us what happens next.
Here are some of the results…
This is Toms version of the Story.
What appeared in front of them after they came downstairs,
And how it got there, no one knew.
Perhaps Merlin the wizard of all wizards came during the night
And transformed the toy into a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.
Or perhaps Postman Pat came very early in the morning and replaced it with an
Old English Sheepdog.
Anyhow, there in front of them was a real dog, just as they always dreamed of.
The breed was a Doberman, but unlike any other, this one was not vicious.
When it got a walk in the park, it hardly ripped the souls out of squirrels, and when it was on the sofa, it hardly bit them on the hands, it just cuddled the family like it was their own water bottle
The family thought that the Doberman would be rough and vicious, but luckily it wasn’t.
It was certainly better than a toy dog any day.
What appeared in front of them after they came downstairs,
And how it got there, no one knew.
Perhaps Merlin the wizard of all wizards came during the night
And transformed the toy into a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.
Or perhaps Postman Pat came very early in the morning and replaced it with an
Old English Sheepdog.
Anyhow, there in front of them was a real dog, just as they always dreamed of.
The breed was a Doberman, but unlike any other, this one was not vicious.
When it got a walk in the park, it hardly ripped the souls out of squirrels, and when it was on the sofa, it hardly bit them on the hands, it just cuddled the family like it was their own water bottle
The family thought that the Doberman would be rough and vicious, but luckily it wasn’t.
It was certainly better than a toy dog any day.
and here is Michaels story, which he also recorded for us.
You can write it down and photograph it, you can type it up and send it us, you can read it out loud and record your voice, or make a video and send us the next part.
So here is the start of the story:
They’d always wanted a dog, someone to walk with in the park, to play with and maybe put in a silly jumper at Christmas. The flat was too small though, hardly enough room for the family, so a cuddly dog toy would just have to do. You couldn’t take it for a walk… without looking silly, but it was nice to have next to you on the sofa. Just, well it wasn’t a real dog. Sure it was fluffy and it didn’t slobber on you, but oh how they wished it could be real.
One night, laid in bed, they wished really hard… like wishing to Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy all in one go! But of course this is just real life not a story and so the next morning…
What?
What happens next?
Take it wherever you like, make it as long as you want, as short as you dare, whatever you decide, have fun with it and share it with us.
Put your name on any story or say at the start of recordings or video
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Put your name on any story or say at the start of recordings or video
Tom made us this brilliant video of his peg puppets in a action packed adventure!
Using the instructions below as a guideline, you can make many different characters and could even perform your own puppet show.
You will need:
A peg (wooden ones are best)
Cardboard (cereal boxes work well)
Scissors, Pencil, Glue and Felt pens.
Using a pencil, draw around your peg onto the card.
Now draw your creature to fit the peg shape. Make sure its mouth will sit along the peg opening.
Colour your creature and when your happy with the design, cut it out.
Cut your creature in half along its mouth line.
Glue each half onto the peg. Allow to dry.
If you want to you can add a wobbly eye or tongue. For more inspiration search Pinterest.
But wait!!! We don’t have any pegs in the house! Not to worry, get creative and add a puppet to your fingers (or just draw on them) You could use some safety scissors, anything than open or close!
We’d love to see some video or pictures of your finished creations that we can share with everyone.
Please email your work to us. If what you are sending is too large to attach let us know via the email and we will send you a link to an uploader. Click here to email.
Ashton Group Youth Theatre 