Cuddly Science At Country File Live (by sarah)
The Cuddly Science Paleo Posse were really excited to be at Country File Live with the Gloucestershire Geology Trust. They got to perform on the Garden Stage of the Wildlife Zone and do a bit of walk about.
#cuddlyscience is on first! @Saffy @Countryfilelive @BBOWT #excited #puppets #geology pic.twitter.com/5uyevPxHUs
— Glos Geo Trust (@GlosGeoTrust) August 3, 2017
The puppets are Mary Anning, Charles Darwin and Mary Leakey and the associated props where a squid hair clip, a triceratops head piece and a brain hat. And together with the audience we explored evolution, landscape, history and science plus quiet a lot of improve humour in response to the kids 🙂
Walking around with the puppets doing little improve sets to let people know about the actual shows was fantastic - I really love this aspect of it.
Children really do love the puppets - far more than I thought they would when I was designing the general concept! They get cuddled rather a lot. Coraline button eyes and all!
Adults often end up in conversations with them as well!
Mary Anning the puppet did seem to spend a lot of her time searching for her pet squid which the children helped her find - she then explained about cephalopod, belemnites and fossilised ink sacs and how looking at creatures alive today you tell a lot about extinct animals and vice versa.
The squid was most popular and got one little one so excited I ended up giving her one of my My Pet Dinosaurs booklets as well as the colouring sheets as after finding the squid she just kept asking questions and she really was very little 🙂
Mary Anning comes from Dorset so... apparently my accent was "not too bad, a little caricature but better than Poldark" - I'm happy with that 🙂 Though I will say whilst telling kids about the fossils in the Geo Trusts' tent I struggled with some of the dino names!
Kids actually came back for successive shows - this is what I found with the British Science Festival too, which is why I don't like just repeating material and try and swirl it all around a bit even if it is the same characters!
I am very pleased with how Mary Anning has turned out and she is such an easy character to play/envelope and as was said by a fellow story teller at Stroud Out Loud the week before - she's a story telling gift - such a colourful life right from infancy!
She is also a good contrast to the other two characters who hated school as she loved it and worked really hard - this ticks my want boxes of role models/relatable things for as many kids as possible.
The Glos GeoTrust also sent a T-rex out with me to help let people know about the show - which was amazing and lit. got all the kids running over!
Of course the other puppets did also get on stage - though I failed to get a pic of Mary Leakey and the brain hat which is a shame.
Darwin was very popular indeed and had to be rescued and placed back in his cryogenic chamber due to the kids wanting to play (I may need to re attach some hair!).
Big thankyou to the Glos Geo Trust and Country File Live and my lovely sound engineer who did tell me his name but I have since forgotten :/
Inbetween rests and performances I also helped out at the GeoTrusts tent - this contained both the Gloucester and Oxfordshire Geological Trusts and contained so much fun stuff!
Geo-Entertainments: when dealing with the public and geology - especially where kids are involved you tend to end up pulling out the dinosaurs. I know myself that the big things for me as a kid were finding my own bits of nature... sticks, feathers, shells, stones and fossils followed by the absolute WOW!!!! moment of the five year old me walking into the Natural History Museum London and seeing Dippy standing there. This was a huge dino skeleton reconstruction and dominated the great hall as you wandered in. I just remember the awe and the silence that enveloped me when what it was was explained. This began my dino madness which was fuelled further by films such as the Land Before Time and Jurassic Park.
The Gloucester Geology Trust knowing their local geology and what engages people have a lot of dino stuff on hand!
These photos are Dr Alice Kennedy showing people the T-rex reconstruction skull, it is one quarter the size of an actual t-rex skull because you know it has to actually fit in a car to be taken to shows, schools and events! (p.s. yes you can get your local Geo Trust to come into your school for talks and workshops, some even have funding to help with this!).
And of course there was the dino-dig! Excavation digs ie sandpits do seem to be really popular with kids (as the Archaeology Festival proved for Cuddly Science).
And who could forget the inflatable dinosaur!
Yes it's planting a tree 🙂
Yes it went for a walk with a bee!
I believe it was an Oxford Friends of the Earth bee but I would not swear to it.
There was a swarm of the things!
But dinosaurs what not the only thing they had bought:
The Geo-Trusts had an amazing array of rocks, fossils, maps and reconstructions with them, including a hadrosaur head banging bit and the Buckland Megalosaurus jaw (yes I know more dinos but shhh). There was a mix of fossils and reconstructions, not to mention a map or two.
Fossil shrimp! Just look at the preservation on this little fellow!
I loved this cute velociraptor skull which got me into many an argument with kids who've seen the Jurassic Park Franchise films but have yet to delve deeper into the mists of deep time and dino-lore!
People who have known me and Al for a while will know we call each other polyp and kids as well... this is because when we first started going out I'd just started my paleo-biology module and was fast becoming obsessed with colonial and modular organisms such as bryozoans and corals (and plants for that matter). Polyps are the little creatures (v. similar to zooids) and I explained the concept to Al and he would pretend to be in a polyp tube and so on... This is why I got rather over excited at these fossil corals etc... 🙂
On one of my University interviews - Birmingham I think - I was given a fossil to try and identify - I thought it was a coral. It wasn't it was a mammoth tooth dredged from the English channel (I think it was a long time ago!). This misidentification burned what a mammoth's tooth looks like into my brain and thus when I saw this little one I knew what it was instantly (I still checked though before telling kids that that was what it was!). I never got to do the vertebrate paleo module which made me very sad and working that the Natural History Museum I was limited to the projects I was working on so didn't really get a broad look at macro/large fossils. The thing that looks like a shiny slither of tree is - it is fossil wood 🙂
Dino-Roar! This is a view into the T-rex reconstruction skull - it is angled slightly upwards so you can really see the shape of the teeth. The Natural History Museum used to have little workshops on working out what you could tell about an animal from the skull/teeth/eye sockets ie diet, predation and social structure so I may have wibbled about this to the kids a lot.
Shiny sand dollar! Look at that five fold symmetry!
Glos Geo Trust also had fossil making with plaster of paris with moulds from actual fossils, and a badge maker. And the Ox Geo Trust has 3D dino skull masks and little dino puppets which I sadly failed to get any photos of because to be quiet frank it was really quiet busy!
Education, Events and Outings, Geology, Sarah | sarah | 
Fri 11th Aug 2017 9:15 am
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