"I like the things puppets allow you to do."
-- Julie Taymor
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| Sophia and her sock puppets Larry and Sally 3-31-14 |
"Children are more willing to learn when they are having fun,
and puppets are a gateway to opening up the mind and
inviting knowledge in."
--Christie Belfiore,
"Puppets Talk, Children Listen:
How Puppets are Effective Teaching Aids for Kids,"
TEACH Magazine
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| Guido, my sock puppet 3-31-14 |
I'm bending the rules a teensy bit and borrowing a good thing from my weekend for today. But it was a thing too good to pass up.
I brought sock-puppet supplies to a family gathering in my childhood home over the weekend. I have a cute little niece, Sophia, and two cute nephews, Marco and Matteo, and I thought it might be fun. And it was. We all spent part of the afternoon gluing eyes and ears and everything else onto fabric socks. My super-big-kid Leo even joined his younger cousins and built a puppet of his own.
It was interesting how each puppet had a distinct personality that reflected the essence of the imagination of its maker. We all had a blast building our puppets. Sophia, however, was the only one who got to have fun playing with her puppets. It turns out that the littlest kid was the smartest puppet maker of us all.
While the rest of us tried to outdo and out-clever one another with how elaborate or outlandish we could make our puppets, while the rest of us glued on more and more accessories and discussed the hilarious puppet show we were going to stage later on, while my nephews competed for who-go-which hat, or lips, or mustache or who had the glue last, Sophia kept things simple and quiet.
As a result, Sophia's puppets were the only ones that dried fast enough to be played with. By the end of the day, while the rest of us were still waiting for the glue to dry, Sophia was having a ball with her imagination and her adorable new sock puppets "Larry" and "Sally." With just eyes and teeth and a single foam flower, Larry and Sally were loaded with personality. Sophia proved that elaborate does not equal artistic, that less is often more.
The puppet show never happened. Sad face.
My puppet wasn't fully dry until the next day (I had to re-glue some parts that fell off.) I made a little purse-snatching, wrench-wielding thug puppet named "Guido."
I like my puppet, but what I'd have really liked was the chance to play with it, with Sophia.
But hey, I learned an important lesson from this wise, quiet little artist.
Everyone talks about how much kids can learn from puppets. Maybe we should discuss how much we can learn from the kids who make the puppets. That'd be a good thing.
