StoryCloud: The Hoopoe Bird by Emma King and Ross Collins

Illustration by Ross Collins

 Browsing through the Discover Children's Centre website tonight I happened upon the StoryCloud project, an online interactive library created especially for the London Festival 2012.

Here's the site's description: 

StoryCloud is an online story library featuring twelve brand new exclusive stories from award winning and up-and-coming authors and children. Each story is accompanied by a brilliant illustration. A new story will be released each Monday of the Cultural Olympiad until 3 September. The ninth story is now live, The Hoopoe Bird by Emma King and illustrated by Ross Collins.

The Hoopoe Bird is a simple little tale about a cruel magician and an exotic bird that he holds captive. Caught by the magician after a bold rescue mission during which some half-starved dolls are set free, the Hoopoe is chosen to star in the magician's performance show. But the Hoopoe bird has other ideas, and refuses to sing. What follows is a battle of wills between the man and bird.

It's a short and to-the-point tale with few major twist or turns and a strong overall moral. But what really sets this story about is its method of telling.

The story comes to life in the mouths of the fantastic child narrators on the available audio track. They bring warmth and depth to the tale with their tone and timing, and humour through the emphasis on words like 'dark' in the opening line, 'there was once a evil magician who did dark magic.' Whilst the style and tone of their delivery mimics traditional storytelling, the simplicity of the story kept the experience fresh.

I say they because I found it difficult to tell how many different voices I was hearing. There's something automated about the audio production that echoes the text-to-speech Kindle voice, and it certainly sounds like the recording has been heavily edited.

But there was still something about the actual process of being read to that really captivated me. It reminded me of Dr Jane Davis' essay 'The Reading Revolution' in the Stop What You're Going and Read This Vintage collection, where she describes The Reader Organisation's Get Into Reading programme as a 'read-aloud' group. In this essay, Davis describes how magical the process of reading literature aloud can be. She recalls being unexpectedly handed an emotive poem to read in a meeting, 'John had handed me some sad powerful magic, and I'd set it off by reading it aloud, a sort of spell.' It's a beautiful way of pointing out what we lose when we stop being read to as children. 

The Get Into Reading read-aloud groups are primarily focused on bringing the restorative aspect of communal reading to children, the elderly, youth groups, office workers, the mentally ill and many more. (You can find out more here: http://thereader.org.uk/get-into-reading/) 

Faster, Higher, Stronger than you

Wow. Well the Olympic ceremony definitely exceeded this cynic's expectations. It was all just so...entertaining. The fireworks, light displays and set were incredible but it was that perfectly British combination of self-deprecating humour and optimism that really swayed me. The NHS montage was a bit bizarre but as the music scenes unfolded I started to feel this unfamiliar sense of national pride creep over me.

I've heard argued that the ingrained British physical education ideologies of fair play and 'it's the taking part that matters' have hampered our performance on the world stage. Compared to societies that prize competition in sport from an early age like the U.S.A and China, our more inclusive educational approach supposedly fails to inspire and prioritise those that could become olympic athletes.

I can see the logic of this argument. When I started secondary school in the UK in 1998 I can remember P.E teachers encouraging those that excelled at athletics to compete at annual regional events. The students that broke local records were encouraged to keep competing but there was no structured programme in place to develop their talent. As a state grammar school, the overall message was that entry to university was prioritised over aspiring to being a professional athlete. P.E lessons felt like an introduction to each activity rather than an opportunity to develop your skills. I was one of the best tennis players in my class but didn't feel comfortable asking to be matched with a partner of my ability during games lessons, so just ended up knocking the ball about with my friends while we worked on our tans.

Hopefully London 2012 already has and will continue to change this, both by ploughing more money into sport development and creating visible athletic role models. The inclusion of established, retired and up-and-coming athletes in the ceremony last night reiterated that we are capable of producing brilliant and successful sporting men and women. I'd like to see more of a sense of competition and support for the strongest students introduced to state educational P.E lessons. If the current passion for sport spills over into these sessions come September then encouraging competition is surely a better motivator for less able students than limply congratulating them for taking part. Because if the most able students aren't helped to improve and praised for this, what hope is there for the others?
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