ABSTRACT
I have just found a box with various odds and ends in it, including a walnut, a pebble and a shell. Pretty instantly, I knew how they came to be there. They dated from a time when I first started to tell stories (rather than read them) to a reception class when I was teaching at Mayflower School in East London. I had read and reread the Russian story of the witch Baba Yaga and her black geese in the version to be found in Alison Lurie’s Clever Gretchen and Other Stories and wanted to tell it. I thought the walnut, pebble and shell would help my sequencing and enable the children to visualise the key items.
