We scratched our enriched story of A Little Man's Holiday with Southbrook Special School to get feedback from the children there. We ended our story with students from the Deaf Academy sharing their performances to pupils at Southbrook. It was a fantastic afternoon with Southbrook and Exeter Deaf Academy forming links for the first time.

We felt proud putting this poster together to celebrate the various communities we've collaborated with over the last few months. Our enriched story of A Little Man's Holiday is the effort of the collective imaginations of children across Devon.

Over half-term PaddleBoat sailed into Torbay Libraries to deliver a sensory storytelling workshop surround the narrative of A Little Man's Holiday. We had great fun playing with bubbles, sounds, touching shells and coconuts as well as teaching skills such as puppetry. 

Thank you New Model Theatre for inviting us to perform in Plymouth at Outpost this weekend. It was a great chance to test out our new sensory material with a public audeince, and cook a few bacon sandwiches! 

Researching through observation. Last week Katy was lucky enough to be invited to observe ‘Light Show’, an Oily Cart production, taking place at West of England School. PaddleBoat is working with Ellie Griffiths from Oily Cart to enhance A Little Man's Holiday

We spent the weekend learning some basic BSL including some pirate terms and workshop instructions in preparation for our creative residency with the Royal Academy for Deaf Education next month.

We've been playing around with props and set to discover new sensory communication pathways that will allow audience members to experience environments.

Michael tells us about his meeting with Deb from Exeter's Royal Academy for Deaf Education, how we can work together to plan our creative residency. 

Children at the academy will work weekly with PaddleBoat artists on pirate scenes, resilience and expressive arts. Students will feedback honestly to PaddleBoat what works and doesnt work for deaf audeinces and create new ways to express and share ideas with an audience.

Students from the Academy will perform short scenes at their Christmas Day to parents, students and teachers.

We challenged year 4 students at St.Martin's Primary in Cranbrook to come up with a way to communicate the story of the show to other children, including deaf or hard-of-hearing children. The students decided they would pick 10 plot sentences and add sensory words to describe environments and feelings. Then they crafted illustrations to their sentences so that we could send these to our graphic designer, Joe Eason. We intend to create and publish this storybook for children to read before they come to see the final enriched performance.

Here is a short video outlining our project, who we are working with and our aims. We intend to transform our production of A Little Man's Holiday to be more accesible for all audiences.