book excerpt
Through this course and its application, my desire is for you to Experience Puppets. Not just learn how to work them or pick up a couple of tricks, but to experience all that puppetry has to offer: The joy of putting on a puppet and having it “come alive” to the audience. The knowledge that you are communicating important truths to your audience—often without them noticing. The thrill of hearing children repeat lines from the plays showing that learning did take place.
Our puppet experience began over twenty-five years ago when my wife and I began teaching in the Children’s Church program at our church and decided to try puppetry, even though we’d never done anything like it before. The door was open and we stepped through, beginning our puppet experience.
Shortly after starting our puppet experience, a traveling puppet team visited our church and did a program for Sunday School and a second program in Children’s Church. The team was short handed, and upon learning that we were doing puppets, asked us to help with the evening program. We joined their team and began an intensive six-week “on the job” training program.
We were unable to keep up with their full weekend of ministry plus the work schedule with our jobs, so we had to resign from the team. But we were hooked on puppetry. The team we just left usually traveled three to five hours for each weekend performance. We realized that there were many needs and opportunities for puppet programs within a two hour drive and decided to market ourselves to local churches within that radius.
We began our own puppet team that traveled to area churches but with a lighter schedule. Through the years, we’ve developed several puppet teams that have run from three members to a dozen or so.
In this course, I’ll share with you many of the lessons learned in putting together and running a puppet team that I hope will be a benefit to you. We’ll start by taking a look at the various positions on a puppet team, move on to running practices, continue with some team goals and keys to success and finish up with a chapter on finances and the puppet team.
Table of Contents
Introduction-page 4
Puppet Team Roles and Postions-pages 5-21
Keys to Success for a Puppet Team-pages 26-28
Puppet Team Practices-pages 29-35
Puppet Team Finances-pages 36-38
Introduction to the Puppet Program-pages 39-40
The Puppet Program-pages 41-44
The Main Theme-pages 45-46
Introducing and Linking Plays-pages 47-50
Applying Puppet Plays-pages 51-53
Application Worksheet-page 54
Application Teaching Segments Worksheets-pages 55-57
Conclusion-pages 58-59
Puppetry Resources-Page 60
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