My Publications
My latest book is now available - and at a bargain price of £16.99 (free postage and packing) if you buy it from my website. Stories for Young Children and How to Tell Them! contains eight terrific stories and eight brilliant chants as well as hints on telling and follow-up activities. AND it's got a CD of me telling them with magical accompaniment from children's musician Bill Roberts. Please note, this is an exciting re-issue by A&C Black of the highly successful Featherstone publications Cooking Up A Story and Talking Up A Story.
Scroll down this page or click on the titles below to see more details of Stories for Young Children as well as my other publications.
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How to buy copies
Payment for my books is through PayPal - just click on the 'add to cart' buttons.
UK postage and packing is free. If you are outside the UK, please email me to arrange payment and postage.
Send me an email if you would like me to sign your copies.
Stories for Young Children and how to tell them!
The Little Book of Storytelling - telling stories in the Foundation Stage
Shemi's Tall Tales - stories for all the family
Elephant Luck - friendship across boundaries
Open Secret - a novel for young people
Tell It - a practical guide to Primary-age storytelling
The River that Went to the Sky - stories from Africa
Time for Telling - storytellers' tales from around the world
Stories for Young Children - and how to tell them!
Stories for Young Children and How to Tell Them! is a wonderful collection of stories and oral storytelling advice for Early Years practitioners, parents and carers.The emphasis is on creativity and enjoyment - getting children engaged and stimulating their thinking. The sound, practical guidance will help even the least confident to make the most of storytime.
Delightfully illustrated in full colour, the book contains a wide selection of traditional and original stories together with chants, rhymes and imagination games plus hints on telling and follow-up activities. Included is a CD of Mary telling all the stories with magical music by Bill Roberts.
Price: £16.99 (for book AND CD). To buy a copy, please click the add to cart button
The Little Book of Storytelling
The Little Book of Storytelling is both popular and practical. It is just what you need if you’re interested in storytelling with young children. It provides all kinds of ideas and material for developing your skills – rhymes and chants, action stories, plans for making up new stories, a good selection of folktales, new stories for passing on, a wide range of follow-up activities to help children make the stories their own and, as if that wasn’t enough, a wealth of hints and tips to help you prepare and develop your storytelling.
The Little Book of Storytelling appears in Featherstone Education’s hugely popular ‘Little Book’ series. Together with Cooking Up a Story, it won a silver medal at the Practical Pre-School Awards 2005. It is humorously illustrated by Martha Hardy and spiral-bound for easy use.
Price: £7.99. To buy a copy please click the add to cart button.
Currently out of stock - please do not order.
Shemi's Tall Tales
Shemi Wâd – master of mischief and famously far-fetched tales - was a local legend in his time. Born in Fishguard, North Pembrokeshire, in 1815, he entertained all he met with his incredible stories. With heroic exploits involving giant crabs and right-angled rifles, and ending up as a human cannonball on numerous occasions, Shemi never failed to amuse his listeners.
Now with my retelling a new generation can enjoy his exploits. Shemi’s Tall Tales brings together 12 of his most entertaining, fanciful tales, along with a biography of the man himself, Pembrokeshire’s most famous fibber.
Shemi’s Tall Tales, published by PONT Books, is humorously and delightfully illustrated by Jac Jones, one of Wales’s best known illustrators.
Price: £8.99.To buy a copy please click the add to cart button.
Elephant Luck
When Catrin finds a secret box down the back seat of an old scrap car, she suspects someone has hidden it deliberately. Inside is a glass model of the Hindu god, Ganesh. Who could be the owner? Is there a clue in the mysterious letter hidden at the bottom of the box?
The story brings together two girls – Catrin from Fishguard and Sunita, an Asian girl who lives in Swansea but happens to be visiting her grandmother in Kenya as the story takes place. As the mystery unfolds, so their friendship develops despite highly contrasting cultures and backgrounds.
For teachers in Years 4 to 7, a full set of Teachers' Notes on class activities exploring the moral and cultural themes of the story is available for download.
Price: £4.99. To buy a copy please click the add to cart button.
Open Secret
Open Secret was partly inspired by the real-life saga of the eco-house builders at North Pembrokeshire’s Brithdir Mawr. Eco-awareness is a major theme. In the story, 12-year-old Charlie is taken to live in an idyllic but secret ‘new age’ settlement in the heart of Wales. He often seeks solace in the woods and the company of Megan, a local farmer’s daughter, and when social workers pay a visit, he runs away fearing he is to blame for blowing his community’s secret.
The story has a happy ending as Charlie’s reunion with the Greenland community creates new bridges with the local community. Cambrensis magazine described it as ‘… an ideal ‘class reader’ for top juniors and first-year secondary pupils.’
Kevin Crossley-Holland called Open Secret ‘a surging story shaped by ideals and friendship, desperation and courage, set not only in idyllic rural Wales but in that troubled area where the media invade private lives and sow dragon’s teeth.’
Price: £4.99. To buy a copy please click the add to cart button.
Tell It – a practical guide to storytelling across the Primary age-range
Teachers who start telling stories rather than always reading aloud find it transforms the response. It helps children engage, imagine, predict and participate and, if suitable time is made, it enables the children to make the stories their own, using them as a basis for their own creativity, including retelling the stories orally, writing new ones, book-making, acting and so on.
Tell It is a simple 40-page guide for how to make all this happen right across the Primary age-range.
Published under Mary's Storyworks imprint, it provides help in finding suitable stories (including personal tales, traditional tales and making up new tales), advice on how to remember a story and ways of bringing it to life (including using sound-effects and props), as well as hints on planning a session and organising follow-up activities (including story-mapping and story-boarding). There are suggestions for further development, a list of resources and a number of stories as examples.
Price: £5.75. To buy a copy please click the add to cart button.
Tales from Africa (originally published as The River that Went to the Sky)
Published by Kingfisher Books this collection is now out of print but is usually available on Amazon.
Time for Telling (in paperback as The King with Dirty Feet and The Big-Wide-Mouthed Toad-Frog)
Published by Kingfisher Books, this very popular collection of storytellers' stories was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. It is also now out of print but is usually available through Amazon. ________________________________________________________________________________
Recently published stories of mine also feature in the following books:
'Dragon Pale' in Dragon Days (paintings by Brett Breckon), Pont Books
'The Moving, Sighing Statue' in A Gift for St David's Day (edited by Neil Nuttall), Pont Books 2007
'The Door in the Mountain' in The Gingerbread Man (compiled by Pie Corbett), Scholastic 2008
All of these can be acquired directly from the publishers. Click on their names.
