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List of contents
1 Introduction
About My Lesson Plan Structure
2 Johanna’s Newspaper Challenge or The Puppetry Test
3 What is a Puppet? (The Plastic Bags Lesson)
4 Head, Hands, and Heart
5 Everyday Object Puppets
6 The Power of Design: Puppet Metaphors
7 Dwarves Word Cards
7 Chakabesh Traps the Sun: Shadow Puppets and
Storytelling
8 Puppetizing Children’s Literature
9 Puppetizing Science: A Cross-Disciplinary Plan for Younger Children
10 Puppet Filmmaking in the Classroom
11 Giant Puppets and Community Celebrations
The Fabulous Art of Paper Maché
Version by Johanna
12 Quick and Easy Ideas for Making Puppets
13 Finding Material for Puppetizing Lessons
14 A Plan for Devising A New Puppet Play
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Johanna Smith is Professor of Theatre Education, Improvisation, and Puppetry at California State University, San Bernardino where she is also part of the Entrepreneurship faculty. She has served as an artist and educator for professional theatres, museums, colleges, libraries, public schools, private schools, and preschools around the world and loves how puppetry captivates everyone, everywhere. She is a frequent presenter on puppetry as a powerful educational and artistic tool for teachers, and has taken her own "no budget" puppetry productions with CSUSB students on international tours. She lives with her daughter and entirely too many pets in Southern California.
Summary
Winner of a Nancy Staub Award for Excellence in Publications on the Art of Puppetry
Connecting the art of puppetry with deeper learning for children, this workbook offers a comprehensive guide on how to bring puppetry into the classroom. It places puppet design, construction and manipulation at the heart of arts education and as a key contributor to ‘manual intelligence’ in young people.
Packed with practical, illustrated exercises using materials and technology readily available to teachers, Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education shows you how the craft can enliven and enrich any classroom environment, and offers helpful links between puppetry, the curriculum and other aspects of education.
Informed by developments in assessments and cognitive research, this book features approachable puppetry activities, educational strategies and lesson plans for teachers that expand any syllabus and unlock new methods of learning, including:
- Making puppets from basic materials and everyday objects
- Puppetizing children’s literature
- Puppetizing science
- Film-making with puppets
Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education is a core text for arts education courses as well as an essential addition to any teacher’s arsenal of teaching strategies.
Foreword
A textbook for teachers and students of theatre in education which shows how puppetry can be taught in classrooms through educational strategies and lesson plans to open which can expand the syllabus and provide new and exciting ways of learning.
Additional text
[Johanna] Smith's approach to creation and performance reminds educators, parents, and the everyman that puppetry is an accessible and dynamic means to immersive learning. In an age of standardized testing, Ms. Smith's offers innovative assessments that change the way a classroom can be examined and enjoyed by everyone.
