More Ways to Use Puppets as Teaching Tools
The following ideas for using puppets in storytelling/teaching situations in a variety of settings are taken from personal experiences a well as the experiences of friends and students.
- One teacher of four and five year old children in a church setting used sock puppets in her classroom to help the children learn songs as well as to tell/act out scriptures stories. The children also role played real life situations using the puppets to help them understand and apply the principles presented in the lessons. If the puppets did not appear at some point during the lesson, the children wanted to know where they were. The puppets represented human characters such as a grandmother, a grandfather, a brother, sister, mother or father.
- The story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar has been told effectively by a creative librarian using hand puppets made to represent each piece of food the caterpillar eats. As the storyteller relates how the caterpillar eats its way through the week, each item is hung on her arm. By the story’s end this collection of items resembles a caterpillar; as the caterpillar becomes a cocoon, the items are quickly removed from the arm and a butterfly puppet is brought forth. Young children enjoy hearing the story told this way very much. One bilingual storyteller helped the children say the name of each food item in Spanish as well as English as the item was placed on her arm.
- High school students staged a hand puppet production of Aesop’s The Grasshopper and the Ant. The students made their own puppets and set, and a local musician wrote some clever tunes and lyrics, which were performed by the teenagers. The students not only learned about making puppets, but also about working together, being dependable, and presenting the finished product to an audience of family members and friends.
From "Pierre, the Boy Who Didn't Care."
- For a puppetry class project, one college student prepared a shadow puppet presentation of the delightful story Pierre, The Boy Who Didn’t Care. The student created a distinctive voice for each character and used some appropriate music behind his narration of the story. This production was successfully presented to groups of children in a library setting, as well as to a group of neighborhood children who came to the student’s home.
- A creative fourth grade teacher presents a story to the children to show them how a puppet show is performed and then asks for their assistance to perform a well-known fairy tale, such as The Three Little Bears or The Three Wishes. He narrates the story, allowing the children to speak the dialogue if they choose to as they perform the story with the puppets. They learn the sequence of the story, as well as how to manipulate a puppet and develop dialogue and character voices.
- In a library storytime setting, three puppeteers presented the story of The Three Pigs with muppet-type hand puppets. As the story on the puppet stage ended, the wolf (an actor in a mask and costume) stepped from behind the stage and, to the delight of the young audience, related the True Story of the Three Pigs. The pigs were represented by actors wearing snouts.
From these few examples, it is easy to see that puppets, in all their variety, can effectively be used to tell stories in many learning settings to audiences of widely ranging ages and interests.
Einstein observed: “the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” His genius resided in his ability to see and play with ideas, not in his ability to understand mathematical equations.
Puppets are one tool in the drama bag of tricks that allow us to playfully convey ideas and solve problems in out of the box ways. Try using a puppet in your teaching soon.
