Using Magnetic Puppetry in the English Classroom

Highlights:

• Language learning is made interesting by employing Teaching Learning materials(TLMs).
• Students are able to develop their motor skills as well as dramatic and expressive language skills through the use of magnetic puppets.
• Magnetic puppets help the students to create simple sentences on their own.

Background:

I am R. Archana, PST, and I am a teacher at GPS, Sompet. The school is in a rural area, and there are 29 students and 3 teachers in total. This is my first experience of working as a government teacher. Since the parents of my students have not been fortunate to go to school, it is their wish to provide good education to their own children.

Classroom challenges:

The students of my school faced some difficulty while learning English, both in terms of reading as well as writing. Even reading simple sentences from the text book seemed to be a big challenge for them. Many times, the students were unable to identify the words that they had already come across, and they were not able to frame sentences in a cohesive manner. Thus, communication became quite a tough task for them.

Steps initiated to overcome the challenges:

In order to help my students learn, I started using simple sentences in English to communicate with them. I also tried to employ Magnetic Puppets as a supportive teaching aid and as an effective TLM to teach English to my students.

Summary of the approach:

A child learns a language as a whole and not as a part. So, inputs should always be provided to students in the form of a connected speech. Any connected speech is a discourse, which is one of the four systems of language; the others being vocabulary, grammar, and phonology.

Connection of the TLM to the approach:

TLMs aid in the sensory perceptions by the students, involving all their sensory organs in the transaction process. It reaches children easily, and the ideas get registered in their mind so that they are later able to try and produce the same. Children also have the added advantage of developing fine motor skills as well as dramatic and expressive language skills by making use of the magnetic puppets.

Teaching/learning material—Magnetic puppets:

Materials used to make the TLM:

A shoebox, small cut-outs of characters and background setting, iron nails, cardboard pieces (1 inch x 1 inch), matchboxes or other similar things that can be used as the stand for the box, and a magnet.

Making the TLM:

• A picture suggesting the location of the story (Examples include sea, sky, garden, house, etc.) can be pasted on the back-side wall of the box.
• The iron nails should be fixed at the centre of the cardboard piece.
• Small cut-outs of characters can be fixed onto the protruding ends of the nails.
• The characters can be displayed on their positions inside the shoebox, which is placed horizontally on the stands. The magnet can be placed under the box to move the characters to different positions as is suggested in the story.

Using the TLM in the classroom:

For the lesson titled ‘Curlylocks and the three bears’, the background/location was set as the house. The cut-outs of porridge bowls— one big, one medium, and one small—were kept in the shoe box. The sentence that was to be expressed was “There was a big bowl for Papa bear”. I demonstrated it by moving the big bowl among the three bears to show it was “big”. The whole story was shown to the students in a similar manner for them to understand.

Assessment:

I asked the students to select any particular scene from the story and move the characters inside the magnetic box. They were required to explain the scene using simple English (For example, “Curlylocks opens the door”, “She enters the house”). The students not only tried to express the scenes in English, but they also managed to say it with expressions.

Way forward:

I plan to work closely with my students to help them read and write English proficiently. More importantly, I would like them to be able to communicate fluently in English with correct pronunciations and accents.

Teacher: Archana