Crafting Stories Together – Creative Multilingual workshops for families with children 3 to 6 years old
Crafting Stories Together – Creative Multilingual workshops for families with children 3 to 6 years old
October 25 @ 8:00 am – 5:00 pm IST
Mother Tongues’ Language Explorer workshops provide a unique creative experience for parents and their children based on storytelling, play, visual arts and music. While the workshops will be guided in English, we encourage families to embrace their home languages.
Book Your Place
Free admission, book here
Artists
Margot A. Jones, puppeteer, performer and facilitator
Full Event Details
Can you whisper, rustle, or growl? How about colour, create, and stick things together? If so, this workshop is for you! Discover the magic of storytelling, bring the story to life with sound and movement and craft your own imaginative art to take home. Perfect for kids and grown-ups who love to get creative and have fun! In these series each session is different but connected to an overall theme. Come to as many workshops as you like!
Language: English + Irish + Bring your own! While the workshops will be guided in English, we encourage families to embrace their home languages. This fosters meaningful connections between parents and children, creating a truly inclusive environment.
Language Explorers workshops promote a human rights agenda by creating inclusive, accessible artistic spaces that respect and celebrate every child’s right to participate in cultural life, as outlined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 12). The programme empowers children and families to express their linguistic and cultural identities, fostering pride in their mother tongues and ensuring that minority and migrant voices are heard and valued.
By actively engaging parents and children from diverse backgrounds, including those living in Direct Provision and socio-economically disadvantaged areas, the workshops address the right to equality, cultural participation, and freedom of expression. The methodology places the child’s voice at the centre, ensuring they are not only participants but active co-creators, aligning with a rights-based approach to arts education and community engagement.
Language Explorers is Mother Tongues’ award-winning programme, designed for children aged 3 to 6 and their families.Facilitated by our specially trained multilingual artists, the workshops provide a welcoming space for families from all linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Each workshop is an invitation to connect with your family language(s), through storytelling, play, visual arts, music and movement.
Our artists create a space full of imagination and creativity, in which speaking and listening to languages is fun and something to be proud of. Families come together in high-quality artistic activities while sharing and exploring the diversity of languages in the room – an experience equally inspiring for multilingual families as for those who are curious about other languages and cultures. Workshops are delivered in English, but families are warmly encouraged to bring any and all languages they speak. Whether your child is fluent, just learning, non-speaking, or uses a different way to communicate, this space is for you.
Mother Tongues, established in 2017, is a leading organisation working at the intersection of the arts, language and cultural diversity in Ireland. Its mission is to unlock the creative potential of multilingualism through high-quality, inclusive arts experiences that promote social cohesion, celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and foster a sense of belonging for children, families and communities. Since 2022, our Language Explorers programme has engaged 18 plurilingual artists and reached over 2,500 children and parents. By facilitating high-quality, inclusive arts experiences, we nurture children’s creativity and language skills, strengthen family bonds and enhance community wellbeing.
Speaker Biographies:
Margot A. Jones is a puppeteer, performer and facilitator living in Co, Wicklow.
Born and schooled in Tyrone, she initially trained in in Ireland, the USA and Vietnam, where she earned a PhD in traditional puppetry. During this time she was influenced by Grotowski and Boal and by work at Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre. On her return to Ireland she worked with various companies including Puca Puppets, and toured to various venues with Irish language work for young audiences.
An insatiable curiosity has led her to extend her work into such areas as early years development, therapeutic theatre, visual arts practice and community gardening. She is fascinated by differences in perception and experience. Working in communities, hospitals, care settings, museums and schools she pursues this interest through specific facilitative work.
Margot’s recent work includes: shadow-puppet performance of Gilgamesh (Cashel Arts Festival 2004), studio artist at Signal Arts Centre (2023), puppetry workshops (Lexicon 2024), language explorers workshops (Mother Tongues 2024), Shared Island-Civic Society Cross Border Arts Project (2024-25), participative research in elder care settings (Age and Opportunity 2024-25). She is currently devising a new performance piece which incorporates traditional Irish ballads and aspects of puppetry.
Organisations Involved / Partner Organisation(s):
