Puppetry Workshop Today

Today we hosted a teaching artist from BAM, Raquel Almazan, who led the class in a puppetry workshop. This workshop was included in the cost of our tickets to The Magic City, and we were supposed to have it the day before we went to that show, but the teaching artist came down with the flu and it had to be postponed. That may have been fortunate, though; I think the children enjoyed it even more for having seen the show and its puppets already.

Raquel led the children in a warm-up in which they took turns pretending that her scarf was any number of different objects; the child pretending how to show with his or her body and behavior what the scarf “was.” Our students were wonderfully imaginative and expressive with this game, and Raquel commented to me that our class had come up with ideas that she’d never seen from any other classes before!

After that we made puppets with paper plates or paper bags, and then we experimented with having our puppets make distinctive sounds. Finally, we progressed to very short puppet shows, where a child’s puppet had to confront something that in real life had changed that child (just as in The Magic City, the main character had to deal with her sister getting married, and her family expanding to include another child).

A very good time was had by all!