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Day 13 PPP Hospital D | Puppet Portal Project - hospital D
2009-10-12

Day 13 PPP Hospital D

Theme of the day was market stalls.

A small number of children were well enough to attend the school today (4 all together), allowing me to work with those who came on a very individual level:

I started working one-to-one with a four year old boy, whilst decorating the shoe-box-market stall an making a dinosaur puppet we talked about all his ideas, the boy was very eager to make and spin stories (what you d need if you want to keep a dinosaur- a massive garden!) and amazed by internet-images of a freshly discovered dino -footprint (we got up and imagined how many of us it d need to encompass the foot of that dinosaur), filming did not catch him though.

The children who joined later made stalls and puppets as well, really enjoying the making.

At link �up-time we saw a little puppet show and some market stalls in other hospital schools, a very quiet girl got really engaged showing her props to another hospital via webcam.

I did another one-to �one session after lunch with this girl, offering different ways of how to document/ perform a story with her props, she was neither into filming nor performing or storytelling- but the idea of a purely visual photo-story appealed to her. So she set different scenes and photographed these, and made a little book.

Moving forward with the project, time management and organisation does become more and more manageable, as already stated by Siobhan /Hospital C.

One ongoing challenge is that the duration of the children �s participation in the workshop is often not predictable, thus they sometimes are picked up by nurses in the middle of an activity and often before they filled in evaluation sheets, which serve as important means of assessing the project.

I try to segment a days project into activities which are valuable on their own or have an outcome- a puppet, a prop- that the children can take with them even if they only stay for a while.

But this is not a �permanent recipy� and not always necessary: Even though most children take great pride in their made creations , some seam very happy to contribute to a project and take part in a moment of the process, also if they have to leave before the completion.