1.1 Moon language

And what about all those frightening werewolf stories? There HAS to be a full moon for all the weirdness to start happening. It is enough to make anyone want to bay to the moon!

So here is a challenge for your group: Put your heads together and get more than dandruff! Plan a group dramatisation involving music / the written word / clips from videos … to show how the MOON can create a variety of atmospheres. Don’t be shy – put on your very best act.

Using the group dramatisations as inspiration, write two pieces of creative writing involving the moon as muse.

1. Create a romantic story that ends with these words from a well-known poem by Edward Lear.

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

1. Create a scary story which begins with the words:

How thin and sharp is the moon tonight! Clouds try to scuttle by and are caught on the slim curved crook of the moon tonight! Shadows flit across the moon tonight! Shivers down my spine – it is Halloween tonight!

The mantis and the moon

Stories for the children of Africa

There was a mantis that tried to catch the moon. He wished to sit on it and cross the sky each night so that all the animals would say – “There is the mantis travelling on the moon. He must surely be a god and we should praise him.”

Then the mantis could ride majestically at last, looking down on the great dry desert where he lived – at the camel thorns and empty watercourses and the herds of springbok gazing up at him. He would be proud, for they would think he really was a god, and every creature would revere him. But the mantis was just an insect and the moon was far away. Even the night birds whose shadows dipped across its face would never reach it – so how could a mantis fly there – he with the short, whirring wings? But the mantis was a dreamer and when he sat rocking back and forth on a twig, or cupped in a leaf, he thought only of the moon and a way to get there.

The moon was elusive for it did not always rise at the same time. The mantis decided to capture it as it peered over the horizon – then it was big and cumbersome and clambered slowly into the sky. For when it was high and white it was distant, moving swiftly, and often it disappeared before it reached the far horizon, becoming faint and white like a fragment of forgotten cloud in the rising light of the sun.

The mantis waited impatiently all day until the shadows crept out from under stones and bushes, hunting across the dry ground for each other so they could mingle in cool patches without the heat to wither them.

He watched until the sky was pale green – where the bright daylight and the blue darkness met. And when the moon rose, it came so silently he nearly missed it. There it was, caught in the branches of a camel thorn. The mantis flew to the tree in short, urgent bursts.

He hurried up the trunk – half running, half flying, climbing between the thorns and the drooping fronds of tiny oval leaves. The moon was above him, pinned by the topmost twigs. He struggled upwards and pounced, but he over-balanced and although he steadied himself to spring again, the moon had gone. It was cradled in the branches of a baobab – resting quietly, it seemed, waiting for the mantis to unharness it.