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The Sophisticated Sock: Project Based Learning Through Puppetry delivers a career of in-school experience to teachers, resident artists, and anyone wishing to engage children grades K - five in enthusiastic learning across the curriculum. Karen Konnerth is a world traveling puppeteer as well as arts integration specialist, with countless hours logged developing, implementing, and refining these projects in a wide variety of schools and educational settings. Karen has provided workshops for teachers at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as well as for the U.S. Embassy English Language Specialist program in Central America, Asia, and the Middle East. The book offers time-efficient, step-by-step projects to produce memorable, in-depth, core standards-based, collaborative learning. The magically engaging art form of puppetry is the Pied Piper requiring students to grasp, use, and therefore, remember the curriculum core of each lesson in order to bring the art form to life. STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) learning takes place as students manipulate and experiment with materials for a specific purpose and every project necessitates higher order thinking skills. Explicit diagrams and suggestions encourage puppet making using very basic, quick, and low-cost designs to facilitate immediate use of the art form in formal or informal performance. Specific assessment tools are included for each project. And best of all, students are motivated and enthusiastic as they absorb the 21st Century skills of critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication.
About the author
Karen Konnerth is a visual storyteller who has shared both stories and storytelling opportunities worldwide with children and adults through puppet theater performances, puppet workshops, and arts integrated school residencies. She is arts integration specialist, with countless hours logged developing, implementing, and refining projects on themes varying from reading comprehension strategies, to The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance in a wide variety of schools and educational settings. Educator workshops include presentations at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and for the U.S. Embassy English Language Specialist Program in Central America, Asia, and the Middle East. Karen was awarded the 2011 Puppeteers of America Marjorie Batchelor McPharlin Award for contributions in the field of education. She also initiated and directed the puppetry component of the Teen Docent Program at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, awarded a 2015 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award.
