For many children, drawing the moment they remember best is a key to remembering words and phrases from the script that can broaden their own vocabulary.

Working with the children to display all their best remembered moments in chronological order encourages them to think about the structure of the story.

Drawing maps of the journey that the girl undertakes and the environments that she navigates has proved useful to schools both as a springboard for imaginative work and as a starting point for more formal geography tasks.

Physically re-creating the events of the play has helped many children discover the narrative structure - the cliff-hangers, the moments of tension, the repetitions.

Schools have made use of the physical approach as a route to developing original dialogue and other writing.

Diary writing, from one of the characters' point of view, and imagining different endings have been particularly fruitful exercises.

The themes and meaning of the story are explored by small groups of children re-enacting incidents from the play in their own words. The scenes are used to develop the children's ability to articulate how it feels to be a particular character. Those watching are asked to interpret what they think is happening by describing how the characters look and what the characters do.

How does the girl feel when her parents send her off with the bear? How does she feel alone in the Bear's Palace? What does she learn from the women? How does she communicate with the Troll Princess?

The props and costumes in the production are representational rather than realistic – lots of cloths and headgear. This has often acted as a stimulus for exploring more abstract ways of suggesting The Bear, the Winds, the Trolls and various other characters.

How can children use their bodies to be old or frightened or brave? How will their body shapes affect their voices? How do different body shapes make them feel? And - a different question - how else could we represent different characters and places in a play?

Some of the most creative work that schools do revolves around unanswered questions in the play. For example, how and why did the trolls turn the Prince into a Bear? What is that the bear busies himself with every day? What do the ice-creatures think? Why has the old granny been watching the girl since she was born? What happens to the parents after all these adventures?

We've built a number of larger projects with schools around unanswered questions in several of our plays.

We’re often able to answer questions immediately after a performance but schools have then followed this up with e-mail dialogue, developing the children’s IT skills as well as concentrating their minds on particular aspects of the production.

Our post-show question and answer sessions have been used as press-calls for the school magazine.

One school in particular took a very formal approach. The organiser of the event (the headteacher) and some "general public" (children from other years) were interviewed alongside us by a band of well-prepared "journalists" who wrote up the "press conference" on the school website .

Exploring the principals behind the back-projection and the shadowplay.

How do the winds get progressively bigger? How does the little slide in the projector become a big image on the screen?

Schools have made their own figures and screens to experiment with.