Puppet Project

Exploring Muppet Making in Middle & High School

​This puppetry exploration was planned for March of 2020, and the supplies were funded by Donor's Choose. You can click this LINK to see the campaign and my supply list... but as we all know, this is when schools shut down at the beginning of the pandemic. Now two years later I was able to open the boxes and begin this exciting lesson. This would be appropriate for middle and high school levels.
 
I have taught this a few times before, and though puppetry can be done in many ways, I wanted to do this with foam which can be a bit expensive on tight budgets. This is why I ran a Donor's Choose campaign. The only item I bought myself was a specialty glue HERE, it is what professionals use, but as you'll see in the photos, we glued outside for ventilation. You can use low temp hot glue or other less fume-based cements, but this is "the good stuff." One gallon was enough for 40 puppets, perhaps 50. I poured the glue into old Elmer's Cement bottles so students could use the brushes within the bottles.
 
My intent was that students would create puppets and then have to do a performance. In my school, I am the entire Arts Department, so Drama class is not an option. I thought this might be a fun way to slip it in, and we will be ending our year with a big talent show... so they have to perform for the judges and their performance will be an assessment grade. I gave an added bonus that if they were selected to be in the final talent show, THAT would be their final exam for the year because they would need additional time to practice. (They will still be responsible to participate in my final exam preparations though.)
 
There are 2 ways to begin. Start with the performance idea and build puppets for that performance, OR build puppets and create content to perform later. I created a playlist of skits, parodies, and lip-sync music they could select from or they could find their own. We decided to form groups and pick performances, then build puppets. Many groups chose to do lip-sync performances which are fairly easy, and a couple groups opted for skits. As I am not a Drama teacher, this seemed like an easy way to go. If I had a drama teacher to work with, I would have reached out to that resource and coordinated a lesson with them.
 
In the past, I have had students create puppets of "their inner monster," or a puppet to represent themselves as a person or animal. If the performance is the basis of the puppet, then they create the character for that. There are many directions one can take with this theme. You could do historical character puppets and students could give speeches, or teach about a concepts for any class. The possibilities are endless as are the styles of puppets one can create.
 
To minimize waste of expensive materials, all students had to sketch out their puppets, and create them from paper. We put them together with blue painter's tape so the parts could be disassembled and used as patterns on foam. 

​We used the cement outside to glue them together. It is a chemical bond, so you apply the glue to two surfaces, wait for it to dry, then put them together. We painted our puppets after we assembled them, but part of me thinks, in retrospect, it might have been easier to label the undersides of parts, and paint them before assembly. Spray paint works well or slightly watered-down acrylics and a firm brush. Students who used permanent marker to label parts found those labels showed through the paint... 

There is not one way to build a foam puppet and there are many tutorials on YouTube on how to do it. I have posted my own to the end of this blog post. Essentially you build from a mouth, that is like a "foam taco." You add a strap for the top of the hand and the bottom thumb, then build the face and chin on top of that. We had both ping-pong balls and googley eyes as options. We made wigs from yarn while others used foam like dreadlocks. We traced our hands for puppet hands and inserted sharpened dowels into the side of the hands, opposite the thumb.

​Puppet wrists were slid and glued into the arms of the body of the puppet which was fabric cut into a T-shirt shape. Some students brought in children's clothing and used shirts for their puppet bodies. This was how I have always done this in the past. You can attach the shirt to the puppet head or just put a stitch into the neck of the shirt to catch the space between the thumb and fingers of the puppeteer's hand. Both methods work fine.
 
Grading focused on the level of detail and attention students brought to their work, as well as an assessment grade of their performance. When I announced the exploration, my students were a bit hesitant, but within a few hours they were digging in deep, laughing and having a lot of focused fun!