Sewing Puppets

We have been working hard this week to design and make our Christmas puppets.

We drew the design into our sketch books, we chosen the colour of the fabric we wanted to use and the colour of thread, then we chose which stitch we wanted to use from our practise session. Then we got busy!

We are super proud of our sewing efforts!

Sewing Practise

We’ve had a busy day in Pearl Class today. We have been learning how to sew. Miss Varley showed us how to do two different kinds of stitch to make sure that our fabric stayed together. They were the running stitch and the overstitch. We had pre holed templates to have a go with. Later in the day, we designed our own Christmas puppets to be made next week. Make sure you come back to have a look at our finished puppets!

Christmas 2018

Wow! What a busy December we have had at school…

It all started with a trip to the Pantomime to watch Treasure Island. This was a special treat from the charity Variety. We had a party, and we even got to see Father Christmas and got a present from him! Thank you for letting us be part of this special day!

Next it was time for our FS and KS1 Christmas Craft morning – we had over 50 adults come and join us and get into the Christmassy spirit! Thank you to all the parents and carers to came to spend some time with us!

We had been praticising for a couple of weeks so that we could put on a Nativity Performance for our grown ups and friends. We had an amazing time – take a look at some of the fantastic comments we recieved!

We had been busy working like little elves creating snowman puppets, Christmas cards and calendars. Take a look below… can you spot yours?

Finally it was time for our Christmas Party – we even managed to have a special visitor!

We hope that everyone has had a very Merry Christmas and we look forward to what the New Year has in store for us!

Sewing Skills

This half term, we are learning about how to make puppets in DT.

Do you remember our previous blog post from a few weeks ago when we made finger puppets? Click here to see the post.

Next week, we are going to start designing and making a hand puppet but we don’t want to use glue any more. We need a stronger way to hold our fabric together so we decided that sewing would be a stronger way to keep the fabric together. Before we start to design and make our hand puppets, we need to practise our sewing skills.

We learnt about 2 types of stitch that we can use. They are called the running stitch where the needle goes in and out of the fabric like this.

This is the over stitch where we need to go around the outside of the fabric.

Needles can be really sharp so we had to be careful not to touch the end of the needle otherwise we would hurt our fingers.

This task was something that we couldn’t rush and took a little while to complete but we are pleased that we showed concentration and perseverance to get the job done!

Excellent job everyone!

Making Puppets

In DT this week, Miss Varley set us a challenge.

Can you make your own finger puppet out of material?

We had already learnt about the different kinds of puppets that we could use and what they were made from.

This is a rod puppet and the parts of the body moves when you move the rods. Sometimes it takes two people to help to move a rod puppet.

This is a marionette puppet and it works by moving the strings up and down, backwards and forwards to get the different body parts to move. Pinocchio is a marionette puppet.

These are finger puppets and they fit onto one finger. We can use finger puppets to help to tell stories.

This is a hand puppet and you can put your whole hand inside. Sometime these types of puppets have squeakers in the mouth so when you press it, it sounds like the puppet is speaking.

 Miss Varley gave us some very clear instructions to help us to make our finger puppets. We talked to our friends to decide which puppet that we wanted to make. We noticed that the instructions all had bossy verbs (imperative verbs) in them that made them commands. Can you spot the bossy verbs in each command? 

First we had to choose our piece of material the right colour that would match our character.

Next we had to cut out our template and then draw around it onto our material. This would give us the shape that we needed to cut out.

After that, we had to cut out the shape twice to make a front and a back to our puppet. If we only had one piece, then it wouldn’t fit onto our finger.

Then we had to glue around the edges of the two pieces of material and stick them together. We had to be careful not to put any glue on the bottom of the puppet otherwise we wouldn’t be able to put it on our finger.

Finally, we were able to decorate our puppets to make them look more like our characters we had in mind. We are rather pleased with our efforts.

What do you think?  Can you tell what the different characters are? 

Little Red Riding Hood

This week, Pearl have been reading the story Little Red Riding Hood. We used finger puppets to retell the story in our own words, wrote character descriptions about the Big Bad Wolf and then we used inverted commas to write conversations between the characters in the story.

Next week, we are going to be writing our own versions of Little Red Riding Hood. We can’t wait!