The Benefits of Puppets in Class
1. Design Thinking
Students can build puppets. With a thoughtful approach to building a puppet, they can design their ultimate learning partner.
2. Growth Mindset
Puppet creation requires making mistakes. Your first puppet will always be very, very special. Students learn fairly quickly that what they see in their mind is not the same as what they can make with their hands.
Mistakes in puppet making allow kids to fail in a very low-risk way. They get a practical lesson in imperfection. They also get a lesson in following directions. Some students cut a hole, rather than a straight line, for their mouth. Helping them fix their mistakes reinforces the establishment of a growth mindset.
3. Sharable Media
Privacy concerns are ever-present, especially for elementary and middle school teachers. Students should be creators to show both content mastery and content-specific skills, but when they create their videos, it's ethically hard to share them to give students an authentic, real-world audience. With the puppets as physical avatars for students, videos become sharable so that students get the benefit of a wider audience and feedback while still being protected.
4. Puppet as Co-Teacher
When you make a video to introduce a topic use a puppet. The attention that your students pay is different. I enjoy letting the puppet kick off a lesson, and then I help in the room.
5. Writing with a Puppet
When students write plays, foremost in many of their minds is how they will look, how they will sound, and how others will respond to them. Writing for the puppet allows them to be far more silly, as well as take risks with accents, characters, and plots that they wouldn't try if they were required to act it out live. Not only does it help them learn the content as well as writing skills and dialogue formatting, but they also learn important lessons in collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity.
6. Making Learning Less Threatening
We take risks all the time in learning -- and sharing out is the worst. Using a puppet transforms getting caught in the headlights into shining in the spotlight. Students share with less risk, and the puppet makes the situation a lot more like a performance