Storytelling with Puppets

Thomas, YuBin and Sofia really enjoyed the session.

While working with my Grade 2 and 3 EAL beginners, I am always looking for various ways to motivate them. It is essential to engage my students in assignments that are meaningful and trigger their curiosity. The trick is to combine play and exploration and this time I decided to use puppets. We have several sets of puppets in our EAL elementary department; however, puppets that are created by the children themselves are the most popular. Depending on the time that is available, we can either use the old puppets created earlier (I always try to keep the best ones for the collection) or ask the children the make their own. It is not very time consuming and adds a lot to the process as all the students naturally try to talk and discuss their ideas, consult with each other, choose colors, collaborate and help each other. Even beginners with limited vocabulary and shy students (who are usually reluctant to talk) are highly motivated and become very creative and expressive.

During the last week before the break my students were tired and I chose this activity for all of us to have some fun together.

We started with reading a big book “Who Will Help?”, a version of the little red hen strory that most children are familiar with. It was an easy reading and everybody understood the plot; however, we also discussed the characters, setting and problem.

My students suggested to add some characters and we innovated the story a bit.

We made our puppets and read the story again, acting out some parts of the story. By that time all my students remembered all the events in the story and were ready to retell it without a book.

Thomas and Sofia were real risk-takers and chose to have two various parts.

We performed the story a couple of times swapping the puppets and had a lot of fun.

It was a successful learning experience because all my students even the most reluctant ones were motivated to participate and said their parts. Everybody liked  the lesson and we will definitely do it again.