Telling Tales

This is about a fun and exciting new world of imagination that we have recently unlocked:

Puppet shows!

For years I have wanted my kids to be as imaginative as I was when I was a child. My siblings and I ( mostly spearheaded by myself) would always be acting out plays. writing stories and puppet shows, coming up with the best reenactments for playtime. I remember putting on at least a dozens shows for my parents in my childhood. My kids have never really done that. Perhaps it's because they have had way more screen time than I did as a child. Whatever the reason, I keep trying to encourage them toward coming up with and acting out more stories. Don't get me wrong, my kids have great imaginations. I have really loved some of the stuff they've created. They just haven't seemed to have the need for an audience for those magical worlds that they've invented. I know it's not stage fright that's keeping them from performing... They love to perform! So perhaps it's more of a need for a director?

This all recently became more of a reality with the arrival of a gift from one of their grandmothers.
A puppet show theater. A great garage sale find.

 Just look at it. Isn't it just inspiring and just waiting to be played with? Don't you just want to get behind it and start imagining?
I knew I had to get the kids involved with it somehow.
I suddenly had the idea to introduce it along with an assignment: 'I will read a story and you must reenact it with puppets'. They were so excited about this!
It has now become a goal of mine to integrate it into our fall lessons.

Our first story was the Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter. I read it to them with the instructions to listen carefully to the details, the main characters, and the basic plot. That way they would each be able to recreate one of the main characters and retell the story using their puppets. This goes right along with the lesson on stories I had done in the spring.

Our puppet were not very elaborate. I pulled a cardboard cereal box out of recycling, grabbed some markers, scissors, tape and stir sticks (in lieu of popsicle craft sticks). I had 2 daycare boys with me this particular day, so each kid picked one of the characters, with the 3 siblings of Peter being one collective character, and we drew out the bunnies and gardener onto the cardboard, then they colored them, cut them out and taped them to the stick.

We probably should have rehearsed it a bit more before the actual performance, I realize in retrospect. However, here is the first ever puppet show via our new theater:

 

The next story they wanted to retell was The Three Pigs. My kids were really excited to make the characters for this and spent about and hour getting it ready, then by the time they were done, didn't want to do puppets any more that day. So we postponed that show for a later date. 

Here are the pictures of the puppets.

The big bad wolf and the second pig with the stick house, made by my son.

The first pig and with the house of straw/hay, made by one of my preschoolers.

The third pig with the house of bricks, made by my son, colored in by another fine preschooler.

The next day, the kids were excited by the puppet show theater, but too impatient to make cardboard puppets, so I told them to go into our laundry room and pick from the huge bag of odd socks we'd collected over the years, and make their own sock puppets. I imagined something close to this:

I wanted to see how far their imaginations would take them from the headstart I had given them with guiding through the cardboard puppet project. I also wanted to see if they would come up with their own stories to tell through puppets, if they would do a well-known story, or if they wouldn't tell a story at all, but rather just mess around.

The result was they found glitter glue, foam stickers and markers and made a general mess in my schoolroom. Hmm. Not pretty. But after I had them clean it all up, they made faces on white socks with markers. Then they played with them much like they do with dolls, coming up with the family relationship and acting out a story-like scene between parent and child:

This was so rewarding and fulfilling to me, seeing them just have fun, not realizing how they were expressing their creativity and interacting so well with each other in this format.  I really enjoyed sitting back and letting them go on their own. Okay, so I was probably taking care of a baby or doing dishes somewhere in the house, but still. Not having to show them how to be creative but just letting them explore that world themselves, without them needing me to entertain them was so great.
This is just what I was hoping would happen. I decided that they would retell a story they had heard and liked, to me and we would write it down in a simple, easy-to-act-out way, then read it aloud while using puppets. That will be a daily or weekly (I haven't decided just yet) assignment. I also want them to get into making as many different styles of puppets as they want with all the different materials they want to get their hands on. I already googled "kid puppet crafts" and "Easy to make puppets."

Creativity shows itself in many forms, and it is my intent to unearth it in my kids and the kids in my care and often, as best, and in as many forms as I can. I know I have a hard time doing it all with all the responsibility on my plate, however, I know it is possible in some forms and on a somewhat regular occurrence, and I want to foster it well.

I hope you are able to tell some tales of your own as well.