We all work in different types of classrooms.
You might be an online teacher working from home, or maybe you work in a traditional classroom teaching a larger group of students.
Wherever you work, I’m confident that you can use puppetry to enhance your classes, engage with your students on a whole new level - and most importantly, have a LOT of fun!
So let’s think about your requirements.
For virtual classrooms your task of choosing a puppet co-teacher is a little easier. In an online setting you can use the video frame as a kind of ‘stage’, which means you can hide your puppeteering very easily out of ‘frame’.
So in that setting you just need a traditional upper body puppet that can quickly pop in and out of the class.
Online classroom puppetry has a few other advantages too. You can use a smaller puppet and simply move it closer to the camera to make it seem bigger.
Also, and this is one of my favourite tips, you don’t even need to try and hide your lips from moving. You just move the puppet in front of you when it speaks! For more tips on online teaching puppetry, please take a look at my video here:
For a real life classroom it’s better to use a full body puppet as your new co-teacher. This is because you can include the puppet as part of your classroom decor and can even create a little ‘house’ or area for it.
This was one of my favourite activities when teaching young learners, and I would turn it into a learning experience where the entire class helped to plan and set up the ‘puppet corner’ of the classroom.
Having a full body will make the puppet more relatable to your students and also has the added bonus of being able to model body parts, action words and other real life content.
My Pubbet puppets are designed to be perfect for use in the classroom. In fact, they’re the same size as a toddler, so it’s super easy to buy new outfits and accessories to use in your lessons!
Coming up next: Creating your puppet character.