Tag Archives: primary school puppets

“The Interrupted Wedding” Shadow Show goes to Ladybarn Primary School

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Hello again everybody.  Sorry to have gone a bit quiet for a while. This January I have been mostly attending lots of networking meetings, making plans for the year etc.  So I thought I’d wait till I had something a bit more exciting to blog about.

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Last week though I visited Ladybarn Primary School in Manchester.  The Year 2s were doing a project called Puppets & Magic.  The teachers planned to make hand puppets out of felt with the children and wanted them to be inspired by seeing some professionally made puppets. So I performed our Shadow Puppet Show “The Interrupted Wedding” and did a bit of a lecture demonstration looking at different types of puppet from around the world and some of the history etc.  Then I showed the children some performance techniques and then the children played with different types of puppets themselves. “The Interrupted Wedding” is performed using an umbrella for a shadow screen and is a show we use for parties as well as in schools. The show went down extremely well with the children who really enjoyed the story.  This story is an original one written by Rough Magic Theatre’s own Tim Austin.  It is always nice when children tell you they have enjoyed something without being prompted.  In my experience children give very honest reactions compared to adults who might want to be polite and spare your feelings. They also seemed to particularly enjoy seeing some of the puppets from other Rough Magic Theatre productions that I brought in for them to see.  There were 2 rod puppets from our version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, (Stephano and Caliban), the “Pig/Baby” double ended “mouth” puppet  from Alice in Wonderland and the Bunraku style Alice puppet with real hair, (which came off my own head).  The Alice puppet is fun to show how she works as you can see all her insides by lifting up her dress, (kids always find that kind of thing funny) and then of course her head can be removed to show the hand control.  Seeing the Alice puppet’s body without its head is also something children appreciate a lot! The next school we are visiting is in Keighley where we will be doing our “Hansel & Gretel” show and doing a shoe-box toy theatre workshop.  You can read about this workshop in an earlier blog post HERE. If you are interested in booking any of the above shows or workshops please get in contact.  Click HERE to get in touch.

“We’ll Follow Mr & Mrs Spoon”….At Last More Spoon Puppet Pics!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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You may remember towards the end of last year mentioning a spoon rod puppet making workshop I did at a school, (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL POST).  This was with a Year 2 class at St. Stephen’s C.P. School in Skipton.

Class teacher Carmel Heckman has now sent me photos of some of the finished puppets made by the children.

Mrs. Heckman asked for a puppet workshop that taught the children about joints and I got the basic puppets made with them on the day I visited.  However, the children finished off the puppets adding all the costume details, facial expressions and hair on their own.  They also made the theatre backdrops with their teacher after my visit.  So I was very pleased to see what an excellent job they (and Mrs. Heckman) did of finishing the puppets off.

We had discussed how you can create a character and convey information about what the character is like using the facial expression, colour and costume elements while I was there too.

Mrs. Heckman said:

“We made some wonderful puppets and then we made the theatres, which we only just finished a couple of weeks ago!….The children still talk about the workshop and we continue to be creative every day.  Many thanks for your input.”

If you want a puppet project of some sort at your school, do not hesitate to contact me.  I’m happy to discuss your requirements and create a workshop that fits in with topics that you want to do.  We can also make whatever type of puppets you would like.  Of course, we do shows as well, if that is what you would like.  CLICK HERE TO CONTACT ME