Students learned about different leaders around the world, both past and present. I provided students with the narrative and they created the dialogue to be spoken after the narrator spoke. I printed many photos and students glued them down and cut them out. In the future, students will create more puppets and props without me printing it out for them.

I used chat gpt to help create the narrator portions. :)

Integrating art with science/research!

For Science, students were already in habitat research groups. We've taken part of their group research (food chains from their habitat) and incorporated shadow puppetry with it.

Each student picked an animal from their group's researched food chain, group leaders were the narrators. They researched even more specific facts to help form their dialogue/script, created their puppet on their own, practiced in their groups, then finally performed for their classmates.

The process did take time, but so much fun, learning, and engagement occurred. They felt proud of their hard work as classmates gave them many compliments after each of their performances.

We had been studying the folktale Blancaflor and decided this would be the perfect story to tell using shadow puppetry.

Each group was given a different scene and they had to create the characters, the background settings and any props they wanted to include. Students drew their own puppets (which did take some time) and needed to use their creativity. Students were also given the task of writing their own scripts based on the story.

Students loved the creative process and had an amazing time working together on these projects. Students were shy at the beginning (this video) and tended to speak quietly but after watching the videos as a class they saw their mistakes and did much better the second time around. Unfortunately I did not film those.