Puppets+as+conversation+aid

toc This can be any sort of activity done after students have made puppets out of paper bags.

This is a great activity for review. The way we did it is to have the students in two circles, outer and inner, and rotate the inner circle so that each student is speaking to another student. The activities can be varied (see below)

=Materials:=

glue sticks Construction paper (costco) white paper bags (costco) markers

=Some requirements= As you can see, the puppets varied widely depending on the student. They were told that their puppets had to

1) have all limbs and appendages at least represented 2) have a face 3) be fully clothed.The puppet in the middle's owner refused to give him pants and earned a "censurado" sign as a result.

The students were advised to not only be able to describe their puppets physically, but also to give them personality characteristics, likes, etc., to give them more to say when talking about their puppets. =Spanish 3 activity (review of description)=

For one whole minute, you (the student) had to:

1: for the first five partners your puppet described itself to the other puppet. (yo soy, yo tengo, me gusta, yo llevo) 2: for the next five partners, your puppet described the other person's puppet (tu eres, llevas, tienes) 3: for the next five partners, you (as a person) described your puppet (El/ella tiene, lleva, es) 4: For the last five partners, you described the puppet the partner you just had (tenia, era, llevaba, le gustaba, etc.)

Then their partner would do the same thing. After both partners had gone, we rotated, so they were with someone new. For this day we arranged the room so that there was an outer circle and an inner circle, and the inner people rotated. We had about -37 in each class, so we were able to get around fairly easily. 1 minute: student A 1 minute: student B Rotate etc.

Once they were in the groove, it flowed smoothly, and only took about 2.5 min per pair, so getting around the whole class of 32 took about 45 minutes for 16 pairs.

It worked really well to change what they were doing (i.e., not just have them describe their puppet, so that they weren't describing their puppets the same way twenty times in a row.)

=For Spanish 1, we had each student do the following:=

The students "in charge" would direct the conversation, i.e., ask the questions/initiate. They would then swap being in charge and do the following again:

Say hello, exchange saludos (mucho gusto, etc) Introduce self, ask the name of the other puppet Ask for the puppet's phone number, give their own Give them a command (like a common school command)

=Grading= The way we grade such activities is by participation. Students get participation (5 pts) per day, but they get an extra grade (10 pts or something) for participating well on days that we have activities like this.

Honestly, I think puppets could be used for just about any review or oral performance thing. I plan on using them every couple of weeks or so, making sure they don't get old. As always, there are some students who LOVE the puppets, and others who didn't. But I think it still eliminated the fear of having to go up and talk about yourself in front of everyone. They got to talk about "someone else" whose feelings they couldn't hurt, and if the puppet was talking, it was the puppet's mistake.