Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education: Head, Hands and Heart

Connecting the art of puppetry with deeper learning for children, this workbook offers a comprehensive guide on how to bring puppetry into the classroom. It places puppet design, construction and manipulation at the heart of arts education and as a key contributor to ’manual intelligence’ in young people.

Packed with practical, illustrated exercises using materials and technology readily available to teachers, Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education shows you how the craft can enliven and enrich any classroom environment, and offers helpful links between puppetry, the curriculum and other aspects of education.
Informed by developments in assessments and cognitive research, this book features approachable puppetry activities, educational strategies and lesson plans for teachers that expand any syllabus and unlock new methods of learning, including:

- Making puppets from basic materials and everyday objects
- Puppetizing children’s literature
- Puppetizing science
- Film-making with puppets

Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education is a core text for arts education courses as well as an essential addition to any teacher’s arsenal of teaching strategies.

Johanna Smith is Professor of Theatre Education, Improvisation, and Puppetry at California State University, San Bernardino where she is also part of the Entrepreneurship faculty. She has served as an artist and educator for professional theatres, museums, colleges, libraries, public schools, private schools, and preschools around the world and loves how puppetry captivates everyone, everywhere. She is a frequent presenter on puppetry as a powerful educational and artistic tool for teachers, and has taken her own ＂no budget＂ puppetry productions with CSUSB students on international tours.