Discussion task #3: Building puppets with students for a specific purpose.

Discussion task #3: Building puppets with students for a specific purpose.
The idea of becoming a puppeteacher enchantes me. When I saw Bilingual Birds video and everytime I see Juan dealing with Buddy I feel like I have to join this world of teaching and learning through magic. By using puppets you get access to children's world and once you do that, everything is possible.  I still haven't created my own puppet but I will!
I will share here two activities I did with my students  last year in which they had to create their puppets.
1) Sock Puppet
Students were learning to talk about personal information, such as name, age, favorite color or food... I noticed that when it came to answering  the questions they were doing fine, but they had difficulties to ,make the questions. Therefore, we decided to make puppets and the puppets should interview each other.
Age: 6/7
Material: socks, strings, assorted buttons, googly eyes, pices of cloths, wood ...
Procedures:
First class: Students should create their puppets using the material provided. They should use their imagination and creativity. After creating the puppets, students should give them a name and age. They should also decide what their favorite things are.
Second class: Students puppets should interview each other.
What called my attention was that some students used the puppets as mirrors of who they are or who they want to be.
2) Stick Puppets
Students had to read and perform the story: The Little Red Riding Hood. We decided to do a puppetry.
Age: 6/7
Material: sticks, paper, crayons
Procedures:
After Reading the story, students chose the character they wanted to draw and impersonate. They drew the character in a piece of paper, cut the countour of the drawing and pasted on a stick. They used a puppetry to perform the story.
During this week, I was reflecting upon how a puppet could help kids deal with differences and accept them. For example, we could have a puppet in a wheelchair, or a deaf puppet.

Comments

  1. Juan UribeApril 28, 2016 at 12:31 PM

    Live the enchantment with your students, Nuria. Puppeteaching is a skill that we can all learn, we should all learn. 

    Your perception of how they projected their present and future identities on the puppets is very interesting. I had never paid attention to this aspect. What I really liked in the second experience is that you allowed them to choose the character they identified themselves most with. Choice here is so important as they are really talking about themselves when they manipulate the character they chose. 

    Puppets have been used to talk about taboos around the world with great success. You can see some great videos that educate about natural disasters in the Learning Language with Puppets community. We certainly should educate students about being better people. 

    I leave you all a very important question here: What are we empowering our students with English for?

    ReplyDelete

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