New After School Puppet Club in Easton Community Centre
Little Rays Puppet Club-launch is on Wednesday the 18th of April. If you want to get a taste for what we will be making come along March 25th between 2-5pm at Easton Community Centre.
Puppet Club will be held every Wednesday between 3.45 and 4.45, every session cost £3.00 and this includes all materials, a drink and biscuit.
The Aims of Puppet Club is to gather regularly and allow young ones to create puppets in a supported environment. Sessions are only an hour long so we will make one puppet project per month.
One style will be tackled at a time. For this puppet we will also be creating a set and props. We will also encourage learning how, to create a story and perform. We hope to invite parents to be involved and come see the performances with friends and family! For more details check out http://www.facebook.com/LittleRaysPuppetClub
contact coribona@gmail.com for any further details
Puppets helping with Emotional Literacy
Puppets are a great way to extend reading comprehension and other lessons. Children who can retell a story effectively will advance faster in reading and other areas of education. By using puppets, a child can communicate clearly without being self-conscious or nervous.
Additionally, studies have shown that puppets can be very therapeutic in helping children who are dealing with traumatic situations like death, abuse, and divorce to work through these issues in a healthy way.
Puppets are both entertaining and captivating.
Children can believe and relate to them; they can enter and explore the fascinating inventive world that puppets create.
Learning through play is fundamental to our children’s education, helping them to develop the necessary skills in life. Puppets can stimulate children’s imagination, encourage creative play and discovery and are a wonderful interactive way to introduce narrative to even the most reluctant reader. They can be a powerful way of bringing story time to life; puppets can provide a focus for role play, encouraging the child’s imagination and involvement in activities and can play a fundamental part in the recitation of stories and verse. In addition, hand puppets with workable mouths and tongues are an excellent motivational resource to inspire the teaching of phonics within literacy.
Any puppet can encourage the quietest of children to start talking. Puppets can break down barriers and provide an effective means to initiate communication. The child trusts the puppet and doesn’t feel threatened by it, making it a perfect neutral medium through which they can discuss sensitive issues. The child can express thoughts, fears and feelings through the puppet that they might otherwise find difficult to voice to an adult.
Puppets can assist children with special educational needs. They can motivate and support children with difficulties in communication and interaction. They can help to develop their social and motor skills, and can meet the visual, tactile and emotional needs of the individual child. Large human puppets with glove hands and fingers can be used in conjunction with the different varieties of signing, adding a further dimension in helping children with both hearing difficulties and learning disabilities.
All puppets come to life as characters. They can portray different personalities and various traits and they cross all cultures. Puppets can share joy or sadness; they can be naughty or good, cheeky or shy; and when a child is engaged by a puppet they can learn lessons without even realising.
Puppets provide an essential link between learning and play which makes them wonderful teaching tools for at home, the classroom and in the wider community. A Greensmith
Puppets are safe
Because they are characters, not people, puppets are the ideal medium for discussing sensitive issues. Puppets create a world in which we recognize ourselves and identify with the characters as the drama unfolds. At the same time, a puppet show seems to hold a piece of “safety glass” between the action and the audience-although we are drawn into the drama, we are not threatened by it. It is an extraordinary phenomenon that an audience will accept from a puppet what would cause offence or embarrassment if it came from a live actor. That is why puppets are now widely used in teaching about AIDS and other sensitive matters.
Puppets can portray “bad” characters in a community without pointing the finger at a real individual. They can be used to draw out disagreements within a community or a family without fanning the flames of conflict in the audience. They can be used to talk to black and white children about race and conflict. They can be used to promote the rights of girls to adults who will not listen to a lecture. They can perform to a mixed audience in areas where men and women must sit apart to watch live actors.
A puppet may look terrifying, but its sense of menace is contained. Partly, this is because most puppets are small (even large puppets are often no more than child-sized). But it is not just a question of size. Puppets function more completely within their own “theatre” than human actors do. We are often aware of actors as people who put on a part for a performance and put it aside when they leave the stage. Puppets have no existence independent of their characters. They come without the baggage that accompanies a human actor, and they can get away with things that humans cannot.
Puppets for children
Children relate to puppets from their earliest years because they are used to making inanimate characters come to life. Children are puppeteers themselves from the first time they pick up a shoe, a squeezed-out half orange or a hairbrush and make it move and talk. Toys and dolls take an active role in children’s play. They laugh and talk and argue. They try on personalities and take them off again. The child makes her doll move-she is the puppeteer. She scolds her doll in the stern but loving voice of a mother-she is an actor. She makes her doll stamp its foot and then laughs at the effect-she is the audience. After this early experience a child recognises puppets as legitimate and natural.
The puppet can be whatever the puppeteer and the child make it. It can be the child’s friend without demanding something in return. It can be a clown. It can be naughty and get into trouble without hurting anyone. It can say what the child thinks, feel what the child feels and share a child’s sadness. It can show a child who knows poverty, hunger, war and loss that there can also be joy and love and a happy ending. A puppet can tell a child who rarely hears it that he is loved. A puppet can show a child that her father or mother can also be sad, and it can demonstrate the value of love, the futility of quarrel and the benefit of cooperation and support.
Carol Sterling, former educational consultant for the Puppeteers of America and currently an administrator for the Brooklyn Arts Council, wrote:
“Puppetry provides children with opportunities to achieve the following educational goals”
- to develop creative expression
- to stimulate and enhance imagination
- to develop spontaneous oral expression
- to improve speech, enunciation, and voice projection
- to practice writing skills, become more fluent in oral reading
- to gain appreciation of literature
- to develop coordination and a sense of timing
- to enhance a child’s feelings of self-worth
- to gain self-confidence and personal satisfaction
- to release fears, aggressions and frustrations in acceptable ways
- to develop social interaction skills
- to create and use manipulation in an integrated, purposeful way
I would like to add to that list the following:
- to gain skills in problem solving
- to improve fine motor skills
- to sharpen listening skills
- to come to consensus, give and take of ideas
- to observe the world through the senses, to remember what was observed, to process what was observed and remembered and to recreate it with puppets
- to evaluate
- to polish, improve on what was done
