Tag Archives: Early years

Sojo @ Nottstopping Festival

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Sojo invites you to dive into the imaginations of children through her world of animation. Learn some animation secrets and maybe even have a go yourself!

Big love to the whole of Notts for diving head first into this festival of awesomeness.

I mentioned a few organisations and people who are important to me in this film.

If you want to find out more about Small Steps Big Changes and  Open Water Education Network, here are their facebook pages.
You can also check out what Jayne Williams is up to at New Perspectives Theatre Company here.

Check out said awesomeness here:  
https://nottstoppingfestival.com/whats-on/

Donate to show some real love for the key workers in our community:
http://www.gofundme/nottstopping

Big ups to the organisations making this possible:
Creative Quarter, Nottingham, Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies, It’s In Nottingham, Notts TV, Hockley Hustle, Inspire Arts and Culture

and Ben Welch for being some sort of festival ninja!

‘The Grumpy Hamster’ Story telling and craft workshop @ Ranby House

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Sojo reading ‘The Grumpy Hamster’ at Ranby House

What a brilliant morning of Sojo workshops for little ones at Ranby House in Worksop!

We read ‘The Grumpy Hamster’, tried a spot of yoga, stuffed ourselves with imaginary strawberries and helped out a baby polar by listening to him talk about his feelings and then made our own grumpy hamsters to take home.

I asked all the kids to think about what has made their hamster feel cross today. One little boy said his hamster was feeling cross because his big brother hamster told him to get out of his room. Boy, do we know how horrible that feels!

I also asked who they have in their lives that makes them feel better when they feel cross or sad. One little girl calmly replied “Jesus.” It turns out her father is a priest, so it all makes perfect sense.

All of the kids were a delight and the atmosphere at Ranby House was fabulous. Lovely sofas for big people and soft carpet for me and my little buddies, plus a great area for us to get super messy while we chatted away and made our grumpy hamsters. It was lovely to chat to some of the lovely Ranby House staff too.

Many of the hamsters morphed into hedgehogs. Hedgehogs are more fun to make!

The Grumpy Hamster

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It seems ludicrous that I haven’t blogged about this yet but…

I’ve written a children’s book!
thegrumpyhamster28frontcover29

‘The Grumpy Hamster’ is my first ever published story book as both author and illustrator.

I wrote this as a little personal experiment on spontaneous storytelling. It was completely improvised. I used my iPhone voice recorder and spoke it line by line, whilst getting my niece to repeat each line as I dreamt it up so that I would have the audio for an animation ready to go.

I knew, once we’d finished recording, we’d found ourselves a real gem! A simple and hilarious story, focusing on what we can do when we are fed up with feeling angry.

So I made a book!

Published in 2018 by the freshest children’s publishing company in the UK, Sojo & Mouse, which as the name suggests, I co-founded.