Batty about bats prep

I'm getting ready for this year's 2nd grade school residency, Batty About Bats: Learning About the Environment Through the Arts.

Last year's focus was on butterflies and dragonflies. This year the kids will visit the Lied Center to see a puppet performance of Stellaluna before our sessions begin, so the focus is on bats. And puppets. And stories. And the wetlands. The overarching theme is lifecycles, a topic addressed in the 2nd grade educational standards.

I'd like kids to understand how animal puppets mimic the animals they represent. I also want them to see different kinds of puppets, so I tried to build a bat marionette. I'm not sure if it will work, but it was pretty fun to make. Here's the result so far:

I know, the head looks more like a deer than a bat. I like working with Model Magic, but details are tricky in this medium. One difficulty in this is that the wings don't have a lot of flexibility. I've also been playing with a fabric marionette with a Model Magic head, but I'm not far enough along to show it.

I also came up with a simple finger puppet kids could make with craft foam. I tried a couple of thicknesses, finding that 2 mm was the best for wing flappability. Here's the result:
Kids will add the skeletal structure and may decorate them in various ways. I made mine plain.

At a meeting with the teachers the other day, they asked about materials. I was set on the foam, but as we discussed it and they played with the foam puppets, they wondered if construction paper or oaktag would work as well. Brilliant! I love working with teachers--they often see the obvious when I've been blinded by my first idea.

More on this residency as it takes shape. The show at the Lied Center is next week and I'll start meeting with the students after that.

Dragonfly residency

Today was the second day of the residency with 2nd graders (7-8 year olds), with sessions at four schools. 

To begin with, Trixie thought we were going to do something with flying dragons--she reached into the puppet bag for a dragon marionette (one of the goals was to introduce the students to various kinds of puppets). It took a while to convince Trixie that we were going to talk about dragonflies, not flying dragons and not dragon's flies.

Even the school therapy dog got in on the residency today. She got some good pats while I was talking. 

I asked the kids what they knew about Monarch butterflies, because another goal was to underline what they already knew and to compare butterflies with dragonflies, in preparation for their trip to the Baker Wetlands.

The students knew quite a bit about butterflies. Some of them mentioned metamorphosis, some talked about how the males have black spots on their wings, others brought up the fact that they're poisonous to birds. They knew the stages of the lifecycle and what happens in the chrysalis. 

From there, I brought out two of my dragonfly fingerpuppets and showed the lifecycle (another key concept) from egg to nymph to adult. The kids had made their own puppets and so we all practiced zipping, zooming and hovering. Oh, and eating mosquitoes from our other hands.

We played with having our puppets nod and shake their heads. We played with different voices and the importance of keeping in character. 

I showed the spider glove puppet and we sang "Poor little bug on the wall" together with different emotions so they'd get the idea of conveying various moods with their puppets. 

The sessions were extremely participatory, with lots of questions and answers. I'll meet with the 2nd graders again in November, after they visit the Wetlands and before they go to the Mermaid Puppet Theatre show of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." More on that when it happens!

Dragonfly finger puppets

I spent a long time looking for dragonfly finger puppets to use in my upcoming residency for 2nd graders (age 7-8, for those of you outside the US). Folkmanis has one. I ordered this for myself, but I'm disappointed--the wings on each side are on top of each other and the eyes are too far apart. I tried a kirigami dragonfly pop-up card. It was pretty, but not what I needed.

Nothing for it. I was going to have to make one up myself. I started playing with a pipecleaner (now called chenille stems in the craft stores), wire-edged ribbon and beads. Here's what I came up with.


Here are a few of them in their, umm, wetland habitat (ignore that sofa in the background!)
One benefit of these finger puppets is that the kids can make them before I arrive for the first residency session. I was thrilled when the teachers offered to do that. Another benefit is that they're quite inexpensive to make--I bought supplies for about 175 of them for under $15.