Yvette's EDUP3008 Reflective Scrapbook : Visual Arts

Visual Arts Lecture- Week 6

In this lecture, we learnt about puppetry in greater depth and detail by Kay Yasugi. Puppetry was defined as “the art of bringing inanimate objects to life” and was known to be all about movement. The history of puppetry stemmed from ancient links such as oracles in Ancient Greece to World War II and modern day puppetry. We learnt more specifically about puppetry in the classroom and that we can use them to engage and communicate with students. They are for all ages and abilities and are beneficial for both shy and confident students. We also were told about the 5 P’s of Puppeteering, which include ‘purpose’, ‘presume’, ‘personality’, ‘practice’ and ‘prepare’. We saw a few examples of different puppets that were exceptionally brought to life by Kay and were able to see first-hand the effectiveness of using a puppet and how engaging it was. These were known as hand or glove puppets which are known to be “the most versatile and popular puppets of all” (Ewing & Simons, 2004, p.55). The pig personality of Chi Chi the Monkey was able to amuse the students and brings on discussion and the silent and shy Rocky the Racoon is useful in getting the students to quiet down. This lecture was extremely engaging and has really made me want to use puppets in the classroom as a tool for learning. As well as this, we learnt about making our own puppets which is also a fun and interactive activity for students to undertake in the classroom as they can be used to “improvise, mime, dance, perform a scripted play, or even perform a circus” (Ewing & Simons, 2004, p.56). Below is a link to Kay Yasugi’s website 'Pupperoo's" which is filled with fantastic resources and links to use in the future as well as some images from the lecture:

http://www.pupperoos.com

Reference:

Ewing, R. Simons, J. (2004) Beyond the Script: Drama in the Classroom, Primary English Teaching Association, NSW.

Visual Arts Tutorial- Week 7

In this tutorial, we focused on the creation of our own puppets and had to begin by first thinking about the types of puppets we could choose to create. This is because “puppetry gives people scope to choose the medium best suited to the concept or theme to be dramatized” (Ewing & Simon, 2004, p.54). We decided to depict the many children through finger puppets, which are “often the most appropriate for younger children” (Ewing & Simon, 2004, p.54) and would be an engaging creative activity for children to participate in my future classroom. We decided to use the finger parts of a pair of gloves, buttons for the eyes and felt for the hairs for this. Below is an image of the materials we needed for our puppets and the finger puppets as a work in progress:

For the witch, we deiced to create a rod puppet which are “generally too complicated for primary students to make easily, and in any case don’t lend themselves to classroom use” (Ewing & Simon, 2004, p.55). However, for own purposes this type of puppet would serve well in giving the witch movement and a life-like quality in terms of being similar in scale to the human actors in our performance. We began by paper-macheing the balloon with 7 layers of 2 different types of paper which is a good technique to teach children in the future as it allows you to remember more easily what layer you are up to. Images can be seen below of this progress:I believe creating puppets in my future classroom is an important way of combining visual arts and drama and creating a holistic creative performance and aim to definitely incorporate this into my teaching.