A leg falling off, tangled and broken strings, dropped puppets, the 4th grader with the next part wandering off or climbing into the puppet closet and breaking the door, the velcro proving too strong for the many changes and coming apart, the recorded voices being too quiet to hear... that was how practice went. In [curtain call] between practice and classes I was fixing and untangling the puppets and working on the puppet stage and the transition plans.
Covering the stage framework and getting the voices recorded turned out to be major projects. Often I had to remind myself that, however it came out, it would be what God wanted at that point in time.
The play was about the silent e at the end of English words, so each of the puppets had to hold letters, and a different letter in each Act. Our classroom has many business card sized letters,
so I decided to use velcro to attach them to a belt of velcro on each puppet. That worked, but too well. The velcro held on tighter than the staples in the cards. The attaching velcro needed to be smaller. It also didn’t work to use the backing to hold the different letters on the Act list. Pockets of paper worked better.It was another lesson in material availability to figure out how to record the voice parts for the play. Hand held tape recorders are old technology I guess. I couldn’t find any. Then I used Garage Band on our computer, but that meant I had to get the computer to school on two separate days, and make sure we got through the play on those days. When I began to work on cleaning up the recording and trying to get it to a playable CD, the program had a problem. Gary took over then and did that part. We finally figured out how to burn it as an audio CD, but the sound was too quiet. Now I know to turn the recording volume up and try to find the quietest recording spot possible.
Gary also made a wonderful frame for the puppet stage out of plastic pipe. That had to be covered by cloth, though. Pee Chee from BSF came and measured for the amount of cloth. When she took the paper with the measurements home I thought she had decided to buy the cloth instead of me. That didn’t happen. Finally she brought a blanket and one long piece of cloth from BSF. Those worked perfectly.
We needed a chair for the puppet in the last Act, too. One of the 4th graders, Nathan, is always trying to figure out how things
work, so I invited him to try to make the chair. He and Manop, another 4th grader, made this one out of my collection of styrofoam take home containers, potato chip cans, tape cores, and toilet paper roles.Painting a title sign for the play
turned out to be a great incentive for finishing their workbook page. We finished in record time. Then they all painted some letters, except Viroon, who made pockets for the letters for the different acts. (You can see a little of the painted title in the background here) Paul designed the cover for the programs.
We tried to practice the play about 5 times. We got all the way through it only once. The Thai puppet’s leg came off one day. Two of the boys didn’t want him to be the rescuing silent e anymore with his leg off. They felt better when I brought him back the next day with his leg tied back on.
Finally, it was the day for the play. We were first on the assembly program, so I started to introduce the play once everyone was seated. Meaw, the school office manager, stopped me though. They had an introductory part to do first. Whoops!
I went “backstage” and
was untangling the Thai puppet when they started the prayer for the assembly.
After that, I went back out to finish the introduction. The play went great after that. The students did all their transitions smoothly and quietly. They were ready to go right after the introduction to each act. No puppets got tangled or dropped. The only problem was the quiet voice recording.
I have told a few students that if they can practice their English to speak it well enough, and make up or find a play to do, they can use the puppets. Already
a 1st grader, Debbie, is making up a play for them. I did notice that when they heard their voices recorded, they were much more conscious of how they were pronouncing their English words. Self-correction is one thing the past teacher from BSF noted they needed to work on, so this may help that. Now I have to learn the new sound recording program Gary found to put on my classroom computer so I can make it work for the next play!
:J
