No one wanted to do Little Red Riding Hood, as we've got finger puppets for that, and the boys were intrigued that a story had a boy as a central character (and when you think about it, that is a valid point - awful lot of lead females in those fairy tales!)
We printed the puppets out on the backs of old A4 card files which we had got from scrapstore a good while ago. We've used these quite a bit for note book covers too, they make excellent replacements for card stock projects where the card doesn't have to be too pretty.
We used David Bowie's reading of the story on Spotify. Afterwards, we watched the Disneyfied version on You Tube. In this one the duck doesn't die, he is hiding in the tree, which pleased Od but annoyed the boys! Should I worry?
The main problem we encountered was keeping the lamp in place, as Shrek was quite keen to turn it off the moment our backs were turned. He also wanted to wave the puppets around like a maniac which caused a fair amount of upset with our continuity expert (Od). That girl likes things done properly, and can get more than a little frustrated if things don't stick to the plan in her head.
The boys liked listening to the audio story through lunch, and picking out the animals. They didn't like cutting out the puppets (too fiddly) but Od enjoyed this part. Every one enjoyed playing with the puppets but Od's slightly forceful directing eventually wore a bit thin, and the last third of the play was just Od and I.
We've kept the puppets in an old jar, and both the boys have taken them out and played with them since. The kids learnt a new story, got to listen to some fantastic classical music and attempted shadow puppetry, which is so much harder than we realised!
1 comment:
ooo we did Peter and The Wolf... um, the other year or maybe even the year before? There's a great stop animation version that was on TV - BBC2 or something like that - a few years ago, we borrowed the DVD from the library.
Other central male 'fairy tale' figures would be - the various Jacks (giant killer, beanstalk), Dick Wittington, the third son in Puss in Boots, the solider in the Tinder Box, the soldier in the Seven Dancing Princesses, various seven sons of seven sons...
Irish folk tales often have a male lead, and it's worth colleting the Andrew Lang books if you can get them (the Red book of fairy tales, the yellow, blue, etc etc) as there's plenty with male leads, female leads, and male and female co-operating leads!
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