Chinwags
Storysharing & Entertainment
Inge Van Mensel
I am an Early Years Teacher with more than 15 years experience in both Early Years and Primary settings. I have worked in Belgium, England, Spain and Australia.
During my teacher training overseas, I studied about different children’s books and worked on projects about retelling storybooks in different of ways that we then performed for the children in the local Kindergarten and Primary schools.
During my teaching experience, ,my passion has always been on taking a story book and retelling it in many different ways and extending them with lots of other activities that were drawn from this literacy starting point.
I also kept up my skills by going to courses and workshops related to storytelling, story activity bags, making up songs of a story, puppeteer skills, mathematical concepts from the story, creative writing and many more.
I was also very happy when I got the opportunity to teach other teachers and share them my passion about creative storytelling.
My husband, Paul Longley, who is a professional musician, helped me with the producing and recording of the music that is used before, during and after the show.
My Family
I met my husband, Paul Longley, during one of my Australian visits. We got along extremely well from the minute we met. No more than 2 months after my return to Spain, Paul joined me in Madrid where we got to know each other even better and we had a great time meeting a lot of fantastic people.
When Paul's mum got unwell we packed up our belongings and returned to Australia to be with her. After she passed away we started to travel in a Mitsubishi Van to explore Australia. We were not even 2 days on the road when we found out we were expecting.
After we spent 9 months in Jindabyne, we upgraded our van to a caravan and continued our travels with our 5 week old daughter, Althea Maya. We travelled mainly in NSW and VIC before we flew to Thailand and Europe. It was a lovely experience and it was so nice to share that with our little girl.
On our return to Australia we realized our caravan got too small and we managed to find an old schoolbus that we reformed into our home. It has enough room to store all of my husband's instruments, our little girls toys and of course my performance prop boxes. We love traveling around with it even when at times it is hard to park or manouver through narrow and bendy roads.
Althea Maya's love for stories and music and my love for her, to be with her while she grows up is my inspiration to set up this little business , and to constantly keep improving my performances and workshops.