Lesson Idea | Fable Characters as Paper Puppets

Age Group: 10-13 years
Time Frame: 3 hours
Lesson 2 of the Fables Unit

Question of Inquiry

How can we represent characters from fables and stories through different artistic techniques and mediums?

Rationale

Fables play an essential role in the art of story-telling for teaching children about morals. Fables involve themes and characters that appeal to children and the stories are often humorous. The characters are often played by animals that behave and talk like people, but maintain their animal traits. These stories involve animals that display human-like behavior. Through stories children develop there literary skills.

These stories were originally invented by a slave named Aesop, who was a famous story-teller in his time. Aesop lived in ancient Greece, and his stories were often used to entertain guests at parties. He was rumored to have a very ugly appearance, and he was often mistreated He would come up with stories that aimed to teach people a valuable lesson. His stories would eventually inspire Jean La Fontaine to also create children’s stories that aimed to teach morals.

The Fox and the Crow tells the story of a greedy and hungry fox that sees a crow with a piece of cheese in his beat. The crow eventually gets the piece of cheese by using flattery to get the crow to sing and drop the cheese. The moral this story teaches is “not to trust a flatterer”.

This lesson will allow students to create a fox or crow puppet which they can use to retell the story. They will create a forest landscape collage to be the setting of their story. Once they have completed their lesson they may use their puppets to re-enact the famous fable story.

Learning Objectives

- To create a collage of a forest landscape using colored paper.
- To learn how to overlap paper to give a perception of debt.
- To create a paper puppet that can display motion.
- To learn the morals from the fable stories.