Welcome to Everyday Magic

The project Everyday Magic is one of the projects that has been developed in connection with the Nordic cooperation project Cultural Children of Europe.

Aims and Objectives

Description

The project Everyday Magic is one of the projects that has been developed in connection with the Nordic cooperation project Cultural Children of Europe. It is a 3-year development project where performing artists from the theatre “LIM’eren” set up workshops with childminders in their family day care for children from 6 months to 3 years. Everyday Magic combines storytelling, performing arts and pedagogy. The performing artists engage the childminders in tales and help them to set up and unfold everyday magical spaces for the children. The overall aim of the workshops is to stimulate and challenge the childminder’s creativity, aesthetic experiences and free imagination. This project demonstrates the colourful magic that can be unfolded in the everyday of 10 childminders and their children. At the same time the project confirms how important it is to provide a room for imagination, contemplation and awareness, and to explore creative and aesthetic ways of playing.

The project has grown from the childminders’ own search for inspiration and good ideas to everyday activities. The original idea of a project about “storytelling” evolved into a project about the “storyteller’s space” – or in other words: from storytelling to magic! “Space” should be understood as a room or an area in the childminder’s private home, e.g. a doll house, playhouse or a tree in the garden, which is transformed into a magical space by changing small details, adding new elements or transforming the whole space into something new and unknown for the children.

The childminders have been introduced to dramaturgical and storytelling methods and these combined with their own ideas has resulted in 10 very different magical spaces for the children to explore in their everyday. This is an example of one them:

Thousand Legends

One of the childminders involved in the project, Johanne, has five children from 0 to 3 years old in private day care. She started to look for things in her home that could be used as transformable objects. At first, she collected toilet rolls which the children painted in different colours. Then she found old Christmas bulbs, dried oranges, glitter and old cans, and by combining the different objects they transformed into a magical, oriental castle with towers and a fairy tale lake. With balloons in the ceiling working as moons and stars, and with snakes, glitter flowers and scraps with animals on the floor, the room suddenly turned into a simple installation that stimulated the children’s senses and invited them to explore and play with the magical objects.

© 2019 Elderberry Ab