Breathing life in to junk

Last Friday Garance, another primary school teacher and I ran a puppet making workshop with eight of the little ninos using recyclable materials like plastic water bottles, toilet rolls, bottle lids , straws, yoghurt tubs etc.

We really wanted to give the kids a chance to use their imagination and not just copy or recreate a previously conceived idea. This practice seems to be fairly common among the kids here. For a lot of them their concept of drawing is tracing from a colouring book. 

We wanted to foster innovation and creativity, convincing the kids that anything could be a puppet and that recycling can be really fun.

To prepare for this activity we assembled all the recyclable materials on a table at the back of the room and on the white board we wrote a short introduction on what a puppet was and questions for the kids to think about, in reference to their puppet's personaility.

Shy or boisterous
Young or old
Fast or slow
Polite or rude

After a quick discussion about what a puppet was I demonstrated with a rolled up newspaper that anything could be a puppet. Folding the bottom and top ends to make the head and the tail, I illustrated  how different personailities can be conveyed through different puppet motion and voice. For example an older puppet moves more slowly and utters in a croaky hoarse voice. 

We then asked the children to slowly 'wake up their hand' and allow it to adopt its own personality. There was no prescribed way to do this, so long as each of kids invented a unique persona for their hand. We then all took turns to describe some of the key traits of our new puppets.

Before starting to construct their 'títeres' (spanish for puppet) we needed to brainstorm what different body parts the recyclable materials could be and how you could join them together. We were then all set.


Evaluation
Overall the workshop was a great success. Next week we will be repeating this workshop with some changes outlined below.

- We need to stress to the kids the importance of not wasting resources and planning ahead.

- Sometimes I think giving kids less choice enhances their creativity therefore this week we will limit their options and ask them to make some sort of animals rather than a person or animal. That way we could incorporate an environmental education theme and talk about the needs of animals such as clean water, regular food supply, space to build them home etc. By asking the children to create an animal you can also ask them to be more specific about where this animal lives i.e. in the ocean, in a forest, in a desert and so on. We found that a lot of the previous puppets like to eat chicken and rice so by having puppets living in different environments hopefully this will mean they eat a variety of diets as well.

Photos