There are many simple ways that you can incorporate puppets into your classroom lessons or your library storytime.
When you’re presenting with a puppet, go ahead and just say it’s a puppet. If you don’t very young children, in particular, in the audience will probably interrupt you repeatedly to ask if the character is real, since they’re developmentally working on what is real and what is pretend in their day to day world.
Older kids will also try to impress you with how smart they are by yelling out, “It’s a puppet,” as if you didn’t know it wasn’t a real rabbit or whatever.
If you just introduce the puppet as a puppet, it won’t make it any less real or less magical for your audience.
At the same time, embrace and really believe in your puppets. While you’re manipulating it, you treat it lovingly and realistically, it will be much more enjoyable for the audience as well as for you.
Watch the puppet while you’re animating it, whether you’re hidden from or visible to the audience. If you’re visible and the audience can see you, and they see you watching the puppet, they will then watch the puppet. The audience is going to look where you are looking.
You might glance out at the audience from time to time to kind of gauge their response and include them in the conversation, but avoid competing directly with your puppet, unless you’ve orchestrated some kind of comical puppet versus puppeteer competition.
I’m watching the puppet while animating. It is also going to enable you to monitor the puppet’s movements and believability.
One of the most common types of hand puppet is structured so that you move its entire head as a unit and you can also move its two arms or paws.
Its mouth does not open and close. Your hand goes up into the puppet with your three middle fingers in it. One finger in each of the arms and one in the head.
What you’ll be able to do is make the puppet tilt its head. You can make it rub its eyes, you can make it scratch its neck.
Many of these different motions can be made internally. You can manipulate internally for the puppet.
Some puppets might have a tail or something that you want to manipulate and that would have to be done externally.
One of the most important points to remember with all hand puppets is that effective eye contact between the puppet and the audience is absolutely essential.
You know, think about how disturbing it is when you’re talking with a real person and they’re not looking at you while they’re talking with you. The same situation is true with the puppet.
You need to make certain that your puppet is making intentional eye contact with people in the audience. You know, looking from person to person.
If your audience is sitting down on the floor and you’re up on a chair with the puppet or standing with the puppet, you might need to angle the puppet face downward to look at the audience.
Since you’re going to be watching the puppet a lot while you’re animating it, you should be able to monitor the eye contact that they’re making with the audience.
The other most common type of hand puppet is a puppet with an articulated or movable mouth, similar to a Muppet.
Again, it takes practice to become skilled and really comfortable manipulating the puppet. But practice really pays off enormously, both in terms of enjoyability and believability.
A common mistake that people make when manipulating puppet mouths is for the puppeteer to just open and close the mouth so that the puppet is kind of eating it’s words rather than speaking them.
Think about what happens when you speak. You essentially open your mouth to let a word or syllable out and then you close your mouth after the word gets out.
The puppet should likewise open its mouth to release the word or syllable and close it. Open it for the next one and so on. That looks more natural.
You’re going to try and move the puppets lower jaw more than the top jaw. The lower jaw is about 70%, and the upper jaw is about 30% or so.
It’s probably going to feel unnatural at first when you start doing that. But again, it will help your puppet maintain eye contact with the audience to move it in that way.
If you’re moving the top jaw too much, the puppet’s head is essentially going to be raring back up and again and again like that. It’s important to move the lower one more than the top to practice.
One trick to help with this is to place your middle finger on top of your index finger inside the puppet. You will find you now have less movement in the top of the mouth and more with the jaw. Perfect!
Try counting to five with your puppet. As the puppet says each number your wrist is going to move gently forward, and your hand opens on the number and then your wrist returns to its original place and your puppet’s mouth is going to close.
Finally, a puppets ability to speak provides you with a really good opportunity to give him or her a character voice. It can help define that puppet’s personality. It can help maintain the audience’s interest if you do give the puppet a particular voice, however, you really need to be able to maintain it.
It’s so confusing for an audience to watch and listen to a puppet that has two completely different voices.
Often moving move puppets will have rods attached to the puppet’s arms to allow the puppeteer to move the arms. This will take practice but will result in a much more lifelike puppet.
Puppets often seem to take on a life of their own. A good puppeteer just tries to help the puppet come to life for the audience on, remember that the audience will really love it if you embrace your characters and present them with abandon because it’s not about you, the puppeteer, it is about your audience.
Thank you.