5th Grade Eleventh Visit (December 13th)

What a great final visit! All of the students had finished building their puppets and were crazy excited to work with them. Initially, Mrs. Meiners and I had considered having them build puppets based on a theme of something they were currently studying, but eventually decided to give students complete creative control. The results were fantastic! We had unicorns and dogs, and one-eyed beasts and everything in between. First, we had students create a background for their character, practicing physicality, voice, and character contexts. Then, in true Christmas season spirit, we had the students sing along with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. I filmed it, but unfortunately only half of the students had release forms, so I can’t post it on here. Alas.

5th Grade Tenth Visit (December 11th)

After talking with Mrs. Meiners, we decided it would be a great use of the arts bridge stipend to do a couple of sock puppet lessons with the kids. In retrospect, I wish we had decided on this earlier so that we could have more time to work with the students and do a real puppetry unit, but as it is this will be a fun introduction to the concept of puppetry at the end of the semester for the students.

We only had time for me to do two last lessons, so we decided that on this visit I would introduce the students to the concept of puppetry and start building their puppets. The students would finish their puppets between visits, and I would come back next time and teach them how to give their puppet life and practice a song they could perform as a class for the parent’s day coming up. This is a lot to ask of two 45 minute lessons, but I think I handled it pretty well.

What was awesome about these couple of lessons was that I am finishing up a puppetry class at BYU where I had built a big-mouth orange and blue Shakespeare puppet. I brought him to the class as well as a couple of sock puppets and showed the class how he worked and what I did to give him life. They loved it! Then we got to work with students building their own puppets. Wanna see my Shakespeare puppet? Okay, I guess I can do that:

We had a bit of a hiccup because the extra hot glue guns Mrs. Meiners ordered hadn’t come in yet. So we had 6 glue guns for the 20-odd students in the class. We decided that after I had introduced the first few steps of sock puppet making Mrs. Meiners would oversee half of the glass at the glue guns and I would take the other half of the class, who had sock puppets with mouths but nothing else, and work with them on the rules of puppetry. Then we would switch so I could work with the whole class.

Well, the class didn’t quite finish their puppets, which was fine. They would have the rest of the week in class to finish. But we did get to play with the first rule of puppetry: Focus. That is, the actor’s eyes are on the puppet, and the puppet’s eyes have specific focus as well. This was really hard for students, who kept wanting to look at what their puppet looked at. We played a game where students had to create a name and a voice for their puppet, and greet another puppet in character, keeping appropriate focus. It was harder than you might think.

5th Grade Seventh Visit (October 19th)

What an awesome visit! 

I feel like the students are finally starting to put the elements of drama together. I started my visits by reinforcing the definition of drama: Telling a story using our body and voice. Then, we experimented with a variety of ways we can use our bodies and our voices to communicate character. Now, with these lessons on subtexts, students are starting to understand how body and character can also communicate meaning.

The students had so much fun watching all of the content-less scenes, because so many students were assigned the same script but with different relationships. They loved seeing how different choices could make the meaning of the script completely different. I’m also really impressed with the way every group of students embraced the scenes and PERFORMED! Almost none of the students were half-hearted in their performance, which was awesome to see.