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Putting puppetry into primary literacy
By Ben Williamson, Learning Researcher, Futurelab |
The headteacher's
name is Mrs Sneaky Peeky, the head of science is a mad professor with
designs on total school domination, the dinner lady is evil and covered
in spots, and Mr Allsorts the caretaker still hasn't caught up with
Harry Weird, the mutated mouse responsible for stealing children's
homework f rom their bags. Poor Rosie, with her Viking plaits and
red cheeks, seems like the only normal person in the whole school.
Except that, like the others, Rosie is a puppet designed and made by pupils at Headley Park primary School in Bristol, in a project that has seen boys and girls from two year groups working together with professional puppeteers. And they insist the puppets are not based on their real school - although the caretaker may well earn the nickname Mr Allsorts from now on.
18 children from Years 3 and 4 have been working for an intensive week with Richard Downey and Vicky Andrews from Pickled Image, professional puppeteers based in Bristol, as part of a Creative Partnerships initiative. Working in mixed gender and ability groups of three, the children moulded their puppets' heads in clay, which Pickled Image turned into latex masks, before the children started painting and clothing them.
"When they're finished," Vicky Andrews explained, "the six puppets are going to live in the new library and will be used by other classes for all sorts of activities."
"We can use them for play, for helping with understanding sharing with the nursery children, and for teaching social skills," added teacher Ms O'Neill.
Work on the puppet designs started some time ago. Children from throughout Years 3 and 4 designed and submitted puppet ideas on paper, and wrote letters of application to be involved. 80 applications were received, and the children themselves were responsible for voting for who should attend and which puppets should be made.
According to Ms O'Neill, some of the children were voted in on the basis that others recognised their creative skills, and the result is a diverse group comprising those who are academically very able alongside others who sometimes struggle in more formal school work.
Making puppets has turned out to be trickier than they first thought, though. Richard Downey said, "They're all having to work cooperatively in a situation where a lot of the things they're doing they've never done before."
Despite the unusual situation, he added, "They're engaged, deeply involved, and discovering they can meet challenges they didn't even know they could. For example, when we gave them a lump of clay to mould the heads, the number of times they were saying, 'We can't do it, we can't do it,' but while they were saying that they were doing it already. The end result is they're all fantastic."
With Vicky and Richard stepping back and providing assistance rather than blunt direction, the children have had to take full control and responsibility for every choice they make in their groups. At each stage of development, they are all involved in nominating themselves to undertake certain tasks, such as making teeth from rubber foam or styling wigs, and being self-evaluative about their contributions.
At Headley Park the children are already used to mobilising their self-evaluative skills. The staff refer to these as their 'critical skills' - the ability to be reflective and critical about one's own contributions and work, to be self-motivated, and to see oneself as part of a wider community of learners all contributing to each others' learning.
And this is not the first time that the children at Headley Park have had puppets in their school either. Pickled Image visited before Christmas with a cast of their own puppets to help Year 4 children explore and develop their literacy through a range of gestural and vocal activities.
Vicky Andrews explained that the children were tutored in using puppetry gestures and lip synching to communicate emotions, and to write short scripts based on the emotions they had explored. The project culminated in a cabaret puppet show performed in front of the entire school along with their parents.
For Year 4 pupils Lewis, Amy, Fran and Kirsty, it was a week of tough challenges and nerves, but finally huge rewards.
For Lewis, using gestures to communicate emotion was harder than he thought. "It's pretty hard to like get it right. They give us something that looks pretty easy but when it comes to doing it, if you haven't felt that way much, it's pretty hard and you're like, 'What does this feel like?'"
After they had practised, the children then performed their emotions with a puppet to the other children in their group, who then had to guess what emotion was being communicated. Alongside these activities, however, were a range of literacy activities too, through which the children explored their puppets' identities and characteristics, and created for them rich homes and lives.
Kirsty said, "They were teaching us English and literacy. We had to do writing still but it was fun writing." Fran went on, "We wrote plays and scripts, with stage directions. We did about eight pages of writing, with some pictures. I think it was about eight pages anyway." Amy added, "It was a lot of writing. I think I lost count."
But it was the final cabaret that the children enjoyed the most. "I didn't want to finish it," said Amy, and Kirsty backed her up: "I just wanted to carry on." For Lewis, though, there was a barrier in the way of his performance - he was going on a family holiday to the US: "I was like, 'Oh Dad, I want to talk to you about something - can we postpone going on holiday for another one or two days?'"
Perhaps the litmus test for any successful school activity should be whether the children would prefer staying in school to going on holiday. The children involved in making puppets with Pickled Image on their recent return to Headley Park never seemed in any rush to go out for playtime or lunch when the bell rang, anyway.
As Richard Downey sees it, the attraction of working with puppets and with professional performers is not just the novelty.
"I think, ultimately, that in this process they're trying something new," he said. "And without realising it they're taking a risk with us. We're taking a chance with them, and they're taking a chance with us. It's a process of putting faith in each other."
What is more, the whole school has put its faith in the 18 young puppeteers. Their puppets will be a resource for the whole school to use and enjoy.
Links
Pickled Image: www.pickledimage.co.uk
Creative Partnerships: www.creative-partnerships.com
May 2004
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