Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog where we share our stories and adventures! Goodbye for now - not forever! A fabulous session to finish off our online block of Big Porridge & Play Online! It was a very sunny day in Glasgow and we felt the sunshine through the zoom this week too! The Snowy Leopard, the Jumping Bee, the Curious Ardvark and the Jumping Cat all came to play in the Funky Chicken before launching into a lively round of Hello My Name is Joe! We all dressed up to play I Sent a Letter to My Love and wrote the most marvellous letters… Ibrahim became Mrs Carrot who lived in carrots and ate carrot cake! Queen Fiire wrote a letter to her long lost Princess who she missed oh so much! Yahye became Lego Man! Khadar was Captain Undergold who wrote a letter to Future Place which he hoped would bring him everything he desired! Iona wrote to her beloved water bottle, which kept her hydrated on hot days like this one! Let’s hear Khadar’s letter! ‘My name is Captain Undergo and I live in a futuristic city! It’s called the Future Place, there’s flying cars! And no weather system! There are no houses made of stones or wood, there’s just houses made of robots and metals! What I eat [...]

Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog where we share our stories and adventures! A magical cake, Chef Marigold and an onion tower!! What fun and adventure we had in week three of Big Porridge and Play Online! This week’s session was really run by our participants, who chose what we sang and what we played! We kicked off the session with the Funky Chicken, meeting Gabbie’s Dancing Hippo, Ruby’s Hopping Flamingo, Esther’s Howling Dog, Victoria’s Fighting Tiger, Goodness’s Climbing Lion and Andre’s Silly Dodo! We all dressed up as chef’s for Let’s Bake a Cake and met Chef Bamboo who was in an absolute flap because she’d been tasked with baking a cake for the King!! Luckily we had the world’s most superb chefs in town to help save the day, and what INSPIRED ingredients went into that cake!! Chef Big Ears (Ruby) added chocolate covered broccoli! Cook Onion (Esther) threw in some gummy flavoured onions which were very sweet and fluffy and tasted like a cloud! Granny Cook (Goodness), who had 450 grandchildren, added icing and chocolate! Cakey Chef had travelled from Cake Land and chopped up some potato flavoured strawberries! Chef Marigold (Gabbie) added marshmallows! Chef Magical brought her puppet bowl to mix up her strawberry ice-cream! Chef Weird Things (Andre) added a chair!! What a cake it was! But we’d [...]

Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog where we share our stories and adventures! Porridge & Play Online Week 2!! We had a fabulous Porridge & Play Online session this bank holiday weekend with highlights including a book hunt through the multiverse and ice cream with the Penguin Queen! This week we had a visit from Ruby who was delighted to be invited back into the rich imaginary worlds of Adeelah, Victoria, Gabby, Ope, Fiire, Pemi, Desire, Timi, Nusaibah, Nabilah, Aisha, Khadija, Khadar, Yayhe and Ibrahim! It was wonderful to see everyone responding to each other’s animals in the Funky Chicken. We met lots of hilarious creatures like the Dancing Hippo, the Mischievous Fox, the Falling Chick and the Laughing Crocodile! Even better was when we dressed up and met our own cast of cool characters…✨ ☁️ Magical babysitters who live high in the sky! “We have long arms to reach down & scoop up the babies. We play so many games and we rhyme & sing!” “When I was a little kid I dreamed to be a babysitter! My mum wouldn't let me. But I managed to escape into the forest and I found the child-carers and they took me home” 👸🏿Princess Marigold who lives in a castle by a lake “I live with my friends. We have picnics with cakes, cookies [...]

Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog where we share our stories and adventures! Welcome back to Porridge & Play Online! A Dancing Giant! A Chocolate Cake! Time Land! Dancing Octopus Squishes! What a brilliant first week back at Big Porridge & Play Online! We had Victoria & Gabby, Esther, Glory & Goodness, Khadar, Yahye & Ibrahim, Ope & Olayinka, Ife, Fire, Pemi & Desire! What a team! We started with a Dancing Warm Up followed by the Funky Chicken where we met… The Scary Tiger! (Victoria) The Funky Tiger! (Fire) The Howling Wolf! (Esther) The Stretchy Leopard! (Khadar) The Dancing Hippo! (Gabby) The Annoying Raccoon! (Ope) … I wonder what a Funky Chicken tea party would look like?! We flew up in Flying Balloons and saw the world. Goodness spotted a train heading for Edinburgh! Yahye saw lots of animals eating food! Gabby saw a Woman Giant dancing while eating cake! This reminded Khadar he’d brought some chocolate cake with him, so we all enjoyed eating it in the sky together, washed down by some coke from Victoria, yum! Then it was granny time! A round of Grandma Grandma expertly led by Khadar, Yahye & Ibrahim followed by dressing up as Magic Grannies…. We met Granny Time (Esther) who lived in Time Land which is huge with lots of Big Ben clock’s! [...]

Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog where we share our stories and adventures! Saturday 28th October We had many Halloween treats for our last Porridge & Play Online session to enjoy with our friends! A fabulously monstrous Dance Warm-up, the Spooky Funky Chicken, a creepy Mucky Brew and we did Bookplay with Wee Witches, a play written by our very own Virginia! Wee Witches are funny, Wee Witches are silly, They wear woolly vests when it gets a bit chilly, They can zip like a firework across the night sky, They nip round the world in the blink of an eye, Wee Witches are wonderful wild and free, But sometimes they just like a quiet cup of tea…….. Virginia’s story Wee Witches is perfect for Bookplay as it’s packed with fantastic characters, songs, poems and of course plenty of magical action to play with! So Sarah read a poem from it that inspired us all to dress up and create our very own Witch… Jayden was Witch Hogy Fart ‘I like to make ice cream that looks bad on the outside but inside is super-tasty! I’m from Wizardland’. Nusaibah & Nabilah were The Mushroom Witches Twins ‘We live in Mushroom World, we dance and play but we don’t like children because they want to eat us! We live in a deep dark [...]

Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog where we share our stories and adventures! Saturday 21st October Sometimes when you are reading a good story you almost feel like you are in it… And sometimes, if you feel like it, you can ACTUALLY BE IN THE STORY… BOOKPLAY does exactly that… Choose a story, read it with all your pals and then simply jump INTO the story with your imagination…   This Saturday we did BOOKPLAY with two of our past Magic Ball adventures!   (For anyone who doesn’t know, Magic Ball is the Licketyspit game where we climb inside our Magic Ball to go somewhere unexpected and unexpected and often amazing things happen ! Afterwards we always write about what happened to put in our Blog!) So we today we had a good read of two of our past Magic Ball adventures and then... WHOOOOOOOOSH!!!! We landed at the very, very long beach of our first story!! The sea was so far away! We ran and ran  and ran but we didn’t seem to get any closer to the shore… Luckily Victoria spotted a shortcut - ‘This way!’ she called. Finally we reached the shore where Pemi used his wand to create boats for us all so we could row ourselves out to sea! ‘Rowing is a thirsty game!’ [...]

Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog where we share our stories and adventures! Saturday 14th October 2023 Magic Ball, Magic Ball take us where we want to go! Floating in space jumping and cooing with our pal the Alien! Her friend the Fairy also taught us how to play grooving and dancing, floating in space. When we got tired we flew to Alienland and met a Wee Creature that was feeling sad. Up in a castle, somewhere locked up, the Wee Creature’s family had been kidnapped by an Evil Witch who wasn’t that bad: ‘She feels really lonely and this is why she took Wee Creature’s family cause she wanted some pals!’ We’ll be your friends! We’ll play with you! We’ll teach you to make a potion or two! ‘The toe of a shrew Two potatoes with funny faces on An egg…  CRACK! Stir it up! Stir it up! Some friendship and love. And some rotted fish Unicorns and cup cakes put it all in! Stir it up! Stir it up! Stir it up!’ The Witch loved the potion, set the family free, celebrated with doughnuts filled with love and glee!                             Sarah, Andre, Emma, Taz & the Saturday pals Some of our drawings from Week 2......  ‘Me [...]

Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog where we share our stories and adventures! Welcome back to Porridge & Play Online! We love these sessions because even though we are all at home we still can play together on the Zoom! Everyone was happy, smiling, full of energy and very glad to see each other again after the Summer and ready to use our imaginations to have a great time together! We kicked our play off with a groovy dance to celebrate each other and Andre led us all through our warmup rhyme Big As A Bear…have you noticed that Big As A Bear is really a short story? Stories are all around us to entertain us, teach us and show us all sorts of fascinating things. If you have a wee think about it right now I bet you know many great stories! Maybe someone told you this one, maybe you made that other one up, maybe you read that one in a book!. We know so many stories already and there are so many more for us to CREATE! And so on our first Saturday play session we baked a Stories Cake together. What are the main flavours of your story? Is it a spooky story or a story about adventures? And what about the main ingredients of your story? Is [...]