I completed the Wellbeing through Puppetry in NCAD this summer which was facilitated by the founder of Puca Puppets, Niamh Lawlor. It was really interesting learning creative ways to get learners to design a puppet character. She also brought in Wellbeing by asking us to come up with a story for our character and tie in a journey the character took to get through a hard time. This could relate to school or be completely random! She also got us to draw a quick, story board and tell the class about our character and our story. This is a great way to make puppetry fun in the class and get learners thinking about what their puppet's personality would be like in order to design it.
We learned different ways to make the puppet's head including newspaper with mulch to mould the features, just mulch or if the school had model magic you could use that but it's quite expensive. I found using mulch on it's own would take too long in class and the head is too heavy. Rolling newspaper into a ball and covering it in mulch after would be better.
