Students Perform with Puppets
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With their characters Robert and Donald, Harley Beck and Lucas Grabofsky presented an updated version of "The Man Who Burned His Money."
On Tuesday afternoon, May 23, the fifth and sixth graders at Turner Public Schools presented a Reader's Theater performance to an audience of school personnel, students, parents, and other invited guests. With puppets they created to reenact fractured folk tales they had written, the group performed five puppet shows.
Their teacher, Mrs. Elissa Zellmer designed the activity as a way to introduce students to readers' theater as well as to discuss the concept of folk tales and their purpose in transmitting cultural values and beliefs. After reading five traditional folk tales: Rumpelstiltskin, That's No Way to Do It, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Man Who Buried His Money, and The Sorcerer's Apprentice, students wrote their own "fractured" versions.
A fractured folk tale takes a classic version of the story and adds a twist, either by changing characters or modifying other story elements to make the tale more contemporary and relevant for today's audiences. The main goal of these retellings is to teach an updated lesson or to convey a more modern moral message.
Manipulating the actions of Rumple and Nancy, puppets they designed, Juliann Tomaskie-Hawley and Piper Fox collaborated to rewrite and perform "Rumple and the Daughter." Similarly, Gracie Zellmer, with her puppet named Missy, and Savannah Heilig, with Farmer Jenkins, redesigned their original tale and titled it "That's Not the Right Way." The moral of their story informed the crowd gathered that we shouldn't try to please everyone, as "that's not the right way."
Isabella Van Voast, with her puppet named Cami, and Colt, with his named Foghorn, performed a fractured version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Their version featured a fish who cried shark.
Another pair of students, Isabella Van Voast as Cami and her partner Colt Leitner as Foghorn designed fish puppets to play roles in "The Fish Who Cried Shark." Meanwhile, Lucas Grabofsky and Harley Beck with their puppets Donald and Robert performed their interpretation of "The Man Who Burned His Money," and Hannah Van Voast and Mason Friedrich reenacted "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."
During their performances, students conveyed meaning using their voices and actions from their puppets. These performances enabled them not only to analyze and respond to literature but to increase reading fluency while assisted by costumed puppets and props.
According to Zellmer, who has used this activity or some version of it for the past twenty years in her classroom, the Readers' Theatre script acts as an incentive to elicit thoughts, ideas, and past experiences from the reader. "The students really seem to enjoy this unit. I started it in 2003 when I did my student teaching in Turner, and it has been a staple of the curriculum ever since."
Teaching the unit every other year, Zellmer alternates between fairy tales and folk tales.
After Tuesday's performances, many people stayed behind to take pictures of the stars of the show.
