Workshops
We can bring hands-on learning to your school, library, or community center. Here are details about several workshops we offer. We also offer the following:
- Make and Take workshops, appropriate for festivals or events
- Workshops teaching simple marionette making
- Workshops for adults, including classes that teachers can take for re-certification or graduate credit.
Historical Puppet Tour
Learn about puppets and local history, all at the same time! With audience members acting as volunteer puppeteers, Eulenspiegel will replay historical episodes in each of the following buildings in West Liberty’s Heritage Campus: the depot, barn, one-room schoolhouse, and Highway 6 cabin, with each building featuring a different style of puppetry.
Age group: 8 through adult
Curriculum Connections:
- History
- Art
- Drama
Underwater Shadow Puppets
Each participant makes a shadow puppet of an underwater creature. The puppeteers show participants how to make a simple tabletop shadow stage out of corrugated cardboard. The session ends with an impromptu performance.
Classroom Puppet Potpourri
Puppeteer Monica Leo demonstrates several styles of puppets with short, entertaining vignettes and gives the students ideas for puppet shows of their own. Some students are selected to try working some of the puppets or helping with sound effects while the others form the all important audience.
Czech Style Hand Puppets
Make a classic hand puppet in the Czech tradition. These puppets have round, folk art style heads with charming faces and and no-sew bodies. Learn how lifelike their movements are, too!
Time required: 1 1/2 to 2 hours
Class size: Up to 30; a small material fee may be assessed
APPROPRIATE FOR FIRST GRADE THROUGH ADULT
Making and Using Hand Puppets
The Eulenspiegel Puppeteers will take you through the process of making a traditional hand puppet with a hard head and fabric body. You will make a head of newspaper and plaster bandages, using a process the puppeteers have used in numerous classrooms for over 25 years. You'll paint the face and make a mobile, no-sew body.
Age group: 4-94
Making Rod Puppets
Make a humorous, silly or serious rod puppet character. Rod puppets have heads mounted on dowel rods and arms manipulated with rods. You'll make the head with a process similar to papier mache, paint it, and make a body out of cloth.
Developing and Performing a Story With Shadow Puppets
Participate in the ancient, magical art of shadow puppetry! You'll learn how to make beautiful, mobile, well-articulated puppets out of cardboard, colored acetate, and other things that cast interesting shadows, such as lace and feathers. You'll make characters for a specific story, usually a folk tale, with your classmates, rehearse it and perform it for an audience.
Puppetry in the Classroom or Library
Puppetry in the Classroom or Library
Drawing on 35-plus years of experience working in schools, Eulenspiegel Puppeteer Monica Leo will teach tried and proven classroom projects, using hand puppets and shadow puppets. She'll demonstrate simple construction and movement techniques for both styles and discuss the process of creating a show with students.
Make and Take Workshops
We offer a series of workshops in which participants can make a simple puppet and take it with them:
Finger puppets: Make charming finger puppets with wooden bead or pompom heads.
Age group: Old enough to cut, draw, color, and use glue!
