Flying Bird Puppets

Inspiration: The idea for these came from That Artist Woman who makes some fantastic puppets. Thanks Gail!

I gave the students a template for the bird's body (yes, one of those few occasions where I think a template is OK) which they traced onto some white card.

I decided to use paper plates for the wings as 2 quarter pieces of a paper plate made perfect wing shapes and the embossed edges even looked feathery.
The students decorated their bird bodies and wings with tempera paints and once dry we added a head feather and some sequins for eyes. I then helped them to use a hole punch and split pins to attach the wings.

I had the kids tape a skewer to the back of their puppet so they could hold it but the mechanism with the string had to be done by me as it was a bit complicated. (Gail goes into much more detail on her blog).
If you have a very large class or classes you may want to think twice about doing this on every puppet - but it sure looks cool when they pull the string!

Also - This has been my 100th post on Use Your Coloured Pencils. 

Glad I could make it special with some animations :)

Shadow Puppets

Yeti shadow puppet by Owly.

This lesson was inspired by these awesome shadow puppets - owlyshadowpuppets.etsy.com which I showed the students to help them with their ideas.

Grade 6 students made these shadow puppets from thick cardboard and split pins (they really moved!) based on their own designs of mythical creatures. They took a bit of work and by the time we finished them there was no time for a puppet show :(.  But, they were so cool! and I think it really helped them understand positive and negative space.

Pirate Hand Puppets.

These grade 3 students created their puppets over about 10 one hour lessons.
The head was created first from a styrofoam ball. Students added a nose and ears sculpted from aluminium foil and paper mached the entire head to create a smoother surface. The head was painted in a chosen skin colour and faces were drawn on with textas.
Wool was used for hair, wire for jewelry and hats and bandannas were created from scraps of fabric and cardboard.
The student's hand sewed two pieces of felt cut from a template I had drawn and the heads were glued into the neck slot using a glue gun. Costume and accessories were again made from scraps of cardboard and fabric.