Working with puppets

Play is the fundamental core of learning and growing. One of the easiest ways to start children’s creative energy flowing is to encourage work with puppets. There are many creative possibilities alive in the production of a puppet show… imagination, team-work, organisation, writing, crafting, production…

Children interact with puppets in the same way as they do with dolls and trucks – they believe in them. Children have an inherent ability for play - and to play is to invent. As we let our imagination play upon it, a simple wooden spoon can become a fairy tale princess. In this way, puppets can make a child’s imagination take form.

Buy a range of puppets or better still encourage the children to make their own puppets. A puppet theatre can be as simple as a sheet tied across the door with the appreciative audience on one side and the creative puppeteers behind.

Plays of this sort encourage creative team-work and a sharing of ideas between the participants. Initially perhaps, the child will want to act out familiar stories. After the story has ended, encourage the child to question what the characters have done in the play. What if the Third Little Pig had donned armour and charged the Big, Bad Wolf? What would your child have done if they had been trapped in the house by the Big, Bad Wolf?

In making puppets act out stories, children become more inventive with language and better able to make up the dialogue as they go along, to become versatile when performing.

When children use puppets, they have to transfer their own voices to them, leaving creative openings for different voices and different personality.

Puppet shows can also be used as an opportunity to perform songs.

Puppets can be useful to help children talk about issues that are bothering them. Encourage children to base stories upon real situations in their own lives. A child talks to the puppet not to the person behind it. Puppet plays can be a safe way to communicate feelings that the child is experiencing but finding it difficult to express.

Puppets can be great teachers also! If a child reads with the assistance of a puppet, then you can correct the puppet for its mistakes - not the child. Far less intimidating! I have also seen puppets used to inspire children to write, by sending and receiving letters or by maintaining a diary between the puppets and the child. Puppets can also be used to teach foreign languages in a conversational, non-threatening way.

Puppets are not only great fun, but they will help you and your child open up all sorts of creative and communication possibilities. Play and learn!

Sharri