Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during our Picnic & Play session at the Community Central Halls! Tuesday 2nd July 2024 What can be more Summery than a picnic?… Licketyspits’ Picnic & Play! Even on a rainy day! We met our Maryhill friends at the Community Central Hall this morning since the rain got a wee bit too heavy to play outside but did not stop us gathering and playing together. We had exciting news to share about our upcoming Storyplay Festival happening on Saturday 13th of July at the fantastic Meadow & Children’s Wood: a festival of imaginary play, adventures, friends and food where you are the guest and the host all at once!. We got warmed up and played some favourite Licketyspit games including an ‘up-in-the-clouds and down to the Mermaid Lagoon’ Magic Ball adventure! We then created self-portraits for bunting to decorate the Maryhill Den for the Storyplay Festival. That’s right!! Each hub of Licketyspits’ friends from all around Glasgow are going to make their own DEN at the Festival for all to visit and enjoy different fun offerings!. The Maryhill families decided they wanted to create their very own song to perform at the Storyplay Festival. So we got to it after our lovely picnic and oh it was so much fun! Together we came up with [...]

Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during our Porridge & Play Session at Oakgrove Primary! Tuesday 21st May 2024 Celebrate good times! We had so much fun at Oakgrove Primary - as per usual! Time flies when you’re having fun and these weeks have gone so quickly! We started the day by saying hello to all the friendly faces. Then we made ourselves as big as a tree! A fun little warm-up to get the body and imagination ready to play! Next, we played My Name is Joe. It’s about a guy named Joe who works in a button factory but his boss asks way too much of him! Oh Joe - I hope one day you can tell your boss that you are too busy!! After Joe’s crazy day at work, we met some amazing forest creatures! Alex was a Little Hamster who eats carrots. We met Khadeejah who was a Little Chipmunk who eats spaghetti! I wonder how you make spaghetti in a forest? Anyway, after that we met Shirley the Rabbit and Kenan the Dog who eats rabbits!! Oh no! Don’t worry folks, Shirley was kept safe. We also met Amira who was a Beautiful Butterfly. After becoming forest creatures we thought that it’d be a perfect time to play ‘What’s the Time Mr. Wolf?’. First up was [...]

Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during our Porridge & Play Session at Oakgrove Primary! Tuesday 14th May 2024 There's no such thing as bad weather - only bad clothes! Woah! What an amazing day! We had hoped for sunshine but we got rain… but that didn’t stop us from playing! It really was an unforgettable experience! When we arrived at the Children’s Wood, everyone’s smiles lit up despite the rain. We sang stood in a circle under the trees and learned to sing Ickerickeroo! A song full of brilliant Scottish words - teeth knashers, Nose-Blower, Eee-peepers, Luglisteners, Brain-boxer - thats what they told me when I went to school! Andrea from the Children’s Wood was waiting to meet us. She told us the story of how the Children’s Wood used to be football pitches but when people stopped playing football, the forest grew on the pitch! She prefers the forest… us too!! And it was such a beautiful place to do Storyplay! We played Tree Tag - like Tag but when you get caught, you become a tree! It was really fun playing it in the beautiful wood among the real trees! But then rain came down really hard! Oh no! Andrea had made us a shelter so we stood in a lovely circle with the rain drumming on the [...]

Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during our Porridge & Play Session at Oakgrove Primary! Tuesday 7th May 2024 Love letters, Sandwich Island and a big whale! Back again for week 2 of Porridge & Play Maryhill at Oakgrove Primary! We arrived and the sun was shining high in the sky - a sign of good things to come! The families came and we said hello to the faces from last week and hello to some brand new faces as well! After a minute or so, we all played like old friends First, we started with a dancing warm-up. There were lots of amazing moves - it was hard to keep up!! Next, we played ‘I sent a letter to my love’. We all sent letters to our loves but on the way we dropped them! Someone must have picked them up and put them in their pocket… It was - all of US!! Next, we sang Grandma, Grandma which was so much fun that we all decided to dress up like grannies and then Sarah found something wonderful… a Magic Ball!! Sarah said that if we got inside the magic ball, we could go anywhere in the world! So we all got inside, said the magic words and WOOSH! We were taken to a strange, far away place. We had [...]

Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during our Porridge & Play Session at Oakgrove Primary! Tuesday 30th April 2024 Flying balloons, witchy parades and underwater adventures! It was our first Maryhill Porridge & Play of 2024! We arrived at the wonderful Oakgrove Primary school, who are very kindly letting us play here because the library was too busy. Oakgrove is surrounded by green & trees covered in blossom - like a wee oasis in Maryhill! Jim the Jani got the hall ready for our first session with Licketyspit actor-pedagogues - Sarah, Cami, Steven & Virginia and a wonderful group of families with origins in 7 different countries - Nigeria, Thailand, Poland, Ecuador, China, UK & Pakistan!! We played Funky Chicken & met Arvin's Naughty Snake & and Sobia & Amira's Noisy Parrot to name a few! High in our Balloons we flew over Glasgow spying tiny lego men and forest by the canal before taking off to view America, Australia, Paris and then Egypt where we flew down for a refreshing swim in the River Nile - children and then parents too! Then we dived deep don under the water! It was beautiful! And we met a strange Under-Water Creature who had her own language - luckily Ada & Iris could translate what she said! Then we found treasure! suddenly we [...]

Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during our SPOOKTAKULAR final session at Woodside Library!  Tuesday 31st October Well!  What a  spooktastic Halloween party we had at Porridge & Play this week!   Woodside Library was host to an array of fabulous and fantastical creatures and witches from far and wide! (And we met a spooky chicken, a very scary cat, a monster rat and a scary wolf!)     Have you ever wondered what a witch is like? What they might wear? How they might travel?     The most marvellous witches arrived at Woodside Library today.     They had journeyed from far and near. They looked STRANGE! and it turned out that they LOVED casting ghastly spells!     First Witch Heather and the Bog Witch led our crew of weird and wonderful spell-makers with ear splitting cackles! Ah ha ha ha! Screeched Witch Heather! Luckily Witch Hermione quickly turned Witch Heather into a frog!     The magnificent Witch Mistieosa had flown all the way from Witchland! It turned out she had a brilliant spell to turn people into broomsticks! So she turned the Bog Witch into a broomstick and Witch Heather jumped on top of it and flew about on her!     Witch Jamal,  tried to turn Brodie into an ant….. but the spell bounced past him and hit Witch Emma instead! Amazing!  [...]

Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during our BOOKPLAY session at Woodside Library!  Tuesday 24th October 2023 Let the Wild Rumpus begin! The Maryhill Families had a spectacular afternoon of adventures again this Tuesday at Woodside Library! It was full of marvellous Wild Things!   This week was our first Woodside BOOKPLAY session, Kevan, the Librarian had given us a fabulous book - WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE by a man called Maurice Sendak. First we listen to Steven reading to us. Where the Wild Things Are is a story about a boy called Max who is so mischevious that his Mum sends him to bed without any supper. But as he starts to fall asleep he notices that the walls of his bedroom are turning into a forest and when he looks further he sees a boat! So he gets into the boat and sails across the sea to where the WILD THINGS are! We liked this book so much that we wondered if it was possible for us to jump into the story and to actually go to Where The Wild Things Are! So we all dressed up as wild things and practised our wild faces and our wild roaring! We suddenly realised there was a slight problem- how were we going to get there? It was something we had to [...]

Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during week 3 at Woodside Library!  Tuesday 17th October This week we met some amazing Funky Chicken pals of all shapes and sizes! There was Mohammed’s Happy Cat, Daniel’s Silly Giraffe, Brodie’s  Angry Dog,  a scary Seagull that Maha knew, Lacy and Payton’s Bouncy and Happy Rabbits and a very Silly Lion from Meeshiv. After meeting all these wild  creatures, we found some colourful balloons and decided to go flying across Glasgow and beyond! Everly spied a huge volcano which  was dormant but then, all of a sudden,  it erupted and rivers of lava began to flow toward us  which made us all feel very hot! Then a rather contemporary looking dragon flew out of the top of the volcano and its scales were the most spectacular orange colour with blue spots . We watched it soar high in the sky and then it slowly  disappeared into the fiery sky. Then,  as if by magic,  we found ourselves in Egypt eating Chicken pie! It was so delicious! However,  just before we could ask for a second helping, the sand started to swirl and the wind picked up and we were all caught in the middle of a sandstorm. We were very brave though, and managed to protect our eyes whilst still hanging on to our balloons! [...]

Back again at Woodside Library for Porridge & Play!  Friday 13th October What a great time we had with our Maryhill pals last Friday at Woodside Library! This week we were all very excited about food… so excited, we made a Mucky Brew full of weird and wonderful foods! To start off, we got some huge ostrich eggs and cracked them over our heads which was GREAT FUN, then we covered ourselves in glorious gooey stuff. Nisa began the mucky brew pouring in runny chocolate, Vincenzo added feathers, Daniel and Lacy threw in some watermelon,  AND then we added LOTS more yucky muckyness including tomato sauce, ice-cream, eggs, strawberry jam and a BIG CAKE that we splatted on our faces before rubbing it in. To finish off this delightful mucky brew Everley got us all to take some MALT LOAF & THROW IT OVER EACH OTHERS HEADS and said the magic words!! MUCKY ME! MUCKY YOU! MUCKY MUCKY MUCKY BREW! We were so SMELLY and STICKY that we had to wash ourselves all clean and fresh again and thank goodness Tochukwu had some towels so we weren’t dripping wet! No sooner were we dry, than something truly magical happened and we all transformed into fabulous chefs from far and wide who were all, as it happened, particularly good at baking! This was wonderful [...]

Find out what the Maryhill Group got up to during our first session at Woodside Library!  Munching on Chocolate Croissants in the sky! We had a very exciting first session at Woodside Library on Tuesday and it was so lovely to catch up with old Licketyspit friends and meet all our  lovely new families from St Joseph’s and St Charles, Dunnard and Oakgrove primaries & Happy Days nursery!  We started with a groovy  Dance Warm Up to wake up our bodies and imaginations! Mohammed, Everley and Amina said they enjoyed the dancing best! Then we showed all our new friends how to do The Funky Chicken and we all had such good fun! Maha introduced us to her Happy Cat, Everley was a Happy Dog and Payton, a rather Squeaky Dolphin! This game definitely warmed all our voices up, just in time for some Flying Balloons which was amazing! Later Nnenna drew the most wonderful picture of the view from her balloon - of the community and everything we could see far below us in Maryhill as we soared high in the sky with  our balloons! Of course, the Naughty Seagull , who is always playing tricks, appeared and popped our balloons. So we each blew up a new one to  travel far beyond Scotland, right across the world to Egypt and Nigeria and then [...]