Artist in Residency
ACHF Arts Access ACHF Arts Education ACHF Cultural Heritage
The children will be able to create puppets using recycled materials. Puppets will help the children to bring about their artistic thoughts on what they want to create. A critical second component will be the verbal statements they develop as they bring their puppets alive. A number of basic art foundation “stones” will be laid in color, cutting, and putting together art materials in many figures. The interaction between classmates will also play a key role. The children will experience the following measurable outcomes: a. They will be able to create and make a simple hand puppet with many different types of animal, story and television characters. They will also learn how to make their puppets come alive with colors, voice variations and special movements. b. In making their puppets the children will have their first artistic experience with a true creative artist with a fun theme. They will be laying the foundations for artistic learning in using many different artistic materials and themes. c. Success will be in the creation of a puppet that each child will take pride in. We want this experience to be a happy and enriching one. d. What will have changed is that the children will have had an artistic experience that they have not had before. It will help to bring an enriching artistic experience for them for years to come. The creation of a puppet will be the basic evaluation tool for each child. We will also look at how they put together colors on their puppets. Another key component will be how they make their puppets come alive. We will see that learning has taken place in the creation of puppets that each child makes during this week. With this puppet each child will be asked to bring his/her puppet alive with different voice variations and on basic story themes. We will also ask each teacher to do a written evaluation of the week on how their children did in creating their puppets. Finally, a number of the children will be asked on how they felt about the week and the special highlights they will remember.
The specific outcome of this residency was to have the children make hand puppets which they did. The climax where this was achieved and demonstrated was the puppet parade which took place on Friday. To have 110 children make hand puppets was great. What was so special about this was that with 14 different ethnic groups the children came up with many different ideas on what they wanted their hand puppets to be. There were of course the traditional animal puppets but we also had a number of characters from different countries. To have kindergarten children do this was a major achievement for our classes. These are children who just have not had any experience like this before. For a first time experience we were very pleased to see how the puppets came out. We were particularly proud of the pride the children took in their puppets.