We had an exciting first week of 2015 together! This week puppetry has been our BIG focus! Michael Lamason, from Black Cherry Puppet Theater, joined our 4th and 6th students to begin a 10-day art residency. After four sessions, students created hand and rod puppets using newspaper, masking tape, celluclay (a clay-like paper mache), and plenty of paint, fabric, ribbons, beads and yarn. It is amazing how each puppet developed character after the students added their personal touches! They really thought about their character and their role in the performance in order to portray the character's traits and time period. Our show will cover nearly 400 years of Maryland history!
Not only have we been
learning and performing the steps of making rod puppets, but we’ve started to
create and develop the 6 acts of our puppet play! Our play focuses on the early colonization of
Maryland. The roots of the colonial
period can actually be found in England at the beginning of the 17th
century. The students have studied a
variety of conditions that caused many people to consider leaving their
homeland. This week we’ve learned about
the role the Calvert family played in making the first colony possible. We are currently reading several different
information sources to gain a better understanding of the challenges faced by the
first Maryland colonists as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
The students told us the
parts they were interested in and then we assigned everyone to one of the 6
acts accordingly. The acts have been
written in narrative form. Each group has been reading and learning the
sequence of events in their act.
Together the students in each act started choosing and writing lines
that fit their characters and the story line.
In the coming week we will be put the lines together and revise as
needed to make the story complete. Our
goal is to have our puppets bring the historic story of Maryland’s colonial
period to life.
In between the language arts
and socials studies lessons related to our puppetry experience, the students
have been taking the county reading and language arts test. It is completed now!
