Frog and Toad and the Story

Story:  "Frog and Toad: the Story"  from the book Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel
Puppets:  Frog and Toad (or two frogs will do)
Props:  Squirt Bottle
Presenters:  One (with puppets) or Two (as an Act-Out)
Audience:  Family Storytime
Link to "Storytelling with Puppets" video demo

This may have been the first story I ever told with puppets.  The Friends of the Pleasanton (CA) had just paid for a couple hundred dollars worth of Folkmanis puppets for us, and I had never really done anything with puppets.  We chose wisely, though, and got two Frog puppets (in those days there was only one Folkmanis frog option) thinking Frog and Toad might be a possibility.  I was still too unconfident to try them until I heard Mr. Lobel reading his own stories on tape (books on tape:  that was kind of a new thing back then in the late 80's).  He brought them to life so perfectly, I decided I should try.

"The Story" seemed like the simplest to tell.  Frog doesn't feel well, so Toad tries to think of a story to tell him, and tries some silly stuff to generate an idea:   He walks back and forth:  very easy to do with a puppet.  He stands on his head:  pretty easy too.  He dumps water on his head:  okay, this one was a little harder.  It's kind of awkward to make a hand puppet look as if he's pour water on his own head....they don't have the reach.  So, remembering the advice of Beckie Brazell, an experienced teller and puppeteer, that "if you ever have the opportunity, squirt the audience with water," I had Toad get a squirt bottle and squirt himself...but mostly he misses himself and gets the kids.  Finally Toad bangs his head against the wall, which is pretty easy:  I just use my knee or the chair or whatever as the wall. 

Each time Toad does his thing, Frog jumps up from bed to stop him.  So there's some nice pacing there, as Toad gets progressively more manic while Frog gets more concerned.  Which leads to the neat ending twist, where Toad feels poorly so Frog, feeling better, tells him a story.  And tells the story of a Toad who does crazy things to help him think of a story.  This gives the puppeteer a chance to run through each of the silly antics again, with Frog this time. 

The puppetry is fairly straightforward, with a few touches to make it all work well.  Toad should hesitate a bit before each new action, giving the kids some time to anticipate.  For the water squirting bit, I slip one hand out of Frog to work the squirter, while the other hand still has Toad, but that's simple since Frog is just resting.  Other than that, it mostly comes to life through the words, the plot, and the voices...the voices don't have to be wildly unique, just enough to suggest a bit of silliness in Toad and a more sensible, regular voice for Frog.

This is also a great story for a two-person act out.  Brad and I did it a while ago in Family
Storytime, and the physical humor with puppets is enlarged with real people.  Crashing into the wall is especially fun.  I used to be able to stand on my head and used this story as one opportunity to show off that talent in the role of Toad, but I don't do that anymore....we changed it to "holding head upside down," which even I can manage and is still pretty funny.

Creepy Cardboard Carrots

Book:  Creepy Carrots  by Aaron Reynolds, Illustrated by Peter Brown
Props:  Big Cutout Carrots, Mirror, Bunny Ears, Bedtime stuff
Puppets:  None
Presenters:  2 or 3, plus 2 child volunteers
Technology:  Scans from book projected
Audience:  K-2

When I was halfway through my first reading of Creepy Carrots I was sure it could be a fun puppet show:  Stick puppet carrots sneaking up behind rabbit...it would be great!  But when Roscoe Rabbit builds a giant fence at the end I couldn't really figure out how to make it work, so I gave up the idea.  A month or two later Sheila thought it would be just right for our summer Preschool Stories & Science program, with the "Dig Into Reading" theme and all.  She figured it out:  we could to act it out, add some volunteers from the audience, and fill in selected scenes with some scanned illustrations from the book.  We decided to try it for our K-2 Book Adventure Summer Reading preview, which also used "Dig Into Reading."

We used three staff, with me narrating, Sheila as Roscoe, and Terri as Creepy Carrot #1.  Creepy Carrots #2 and #3 were child volunteers.  Our volunteer Ruth made some great cutout carrots and the three just held them in front of them as they creeped around:

For Roscoe's carrot field, we projected the illustration from the book on the screen, then had a table covered with brown butcher paper at the bottom of the screen, sort of extending it into 3-d.  And we sprinkled a bunch of real carrots in there, so Sheila could hop past, stop, and take a bunch. 


When it came time for the Creepy Carrots to appear, Terri led the kids in the refrain "tunktunktunk" and they just followed her, appearing from behind our backdrop, then ducking back just before Sheila turned around to see them.  The kids rarely stayed all the way hidden, but that was fine.

When Sheila returned to the field to see if the Creepy Carrots were real, we showed the regular carrot scene again, but when she turned her back on it, we clicked for the carrots to appear:

Then as she decides with relief that "creepy carrots aren't real," we did a "grow" animation click so they got even bigger. 

We combined the animation and "live" carrots for the other scenes where Roscoe sees the carrots.  When he looks at the window, for example, we showed the illustration, while the three live rabbits  were showing themselves at the side of the screen:

We put the next window scene, which is on the opposite page of the book, "underneath" the first illustration, then had one "fade out" while the other "faded in," using PowerPoint animation effects again.  And as the non-carrot window appeared, the live carrots snuck back behind the backdrop.

In the end Roscoe builds a fortress around the carrot field so they can't get out.  And it's exactly what the Creepy Carrots were hoping for, since now he can't get in to pick them.  For this, we showed the scan of Roscoe's fortress, then the scene of the celebrating carrots, and had our three live carrots come out and celebrate too.  Much better than whatever I might have come up with for a puppet show.

Overall, the combination of screen and act out worked well.  While the scans on the screen let us share the excellent illustrations, it was the three cardboard carrots interacting with Roscoe that really made it come alive for the audience.  The one disappointing piece was the lighting.  The orange coloring on the book and on the computer screen has a great glowi-ness to it, but that only shows up on screen when it's dark in the room...and we needed enough light to see the acting out guys.  We found a middle ground that worked well enough, though. 

 

And the cut-out carrots were great.  When Terri and I visited some kindergarten classes to promote the event we brought the carrots along, even though we performed a different story for them.  I think just showing them the carrots and showing the book cover might have been all we needed to do....     

K-2 Book Adventure Program Summary - "Dig Into Reading"

We just finished our last "K-2 Book Adventure" of the school year and I realize I haven't posted any program summaries...maybe I'll catch up soon.  For May we made it kind of a sneak preview of our Summer Reading Program, so we used the "Dig Into Reading" theme.  Not the easiest topic for this program, but I think we made it work, picking five books that each have something to do with guys who dig.

 

We started with "Digging Dogs," and acted out a scene from one of my favorite early chapter book series:  "Down Girl and Sit" by Lucy Nolan.  Those books just crack me up; they're perfect for people who like dogs and who have a 2nd grade sense of humor, so no wonder.  Though Down Girl and Sit do some digging in their books, we chose two funnier scenes to act out, both from Bad to the Bone.  As "Ruff" (Down Girl's owner) I tell how Down Girl and Sit got their names, while Terri and Sheila (as DG and S) demonstrate by jumping up and down and not sitting.  Then we did a scene where Down Girl drags her newly cleaned rug through the mud, so it will smell right again.  Some good chasing there as the neighbor cat, Here Kitty Kitty, clings to the rug while Terri/Down Girl runs into the audience with the puppet cat trailing.  We finished with the scene where the dogs grab Ruff's paint brush and get paint all over him ("now he will match the color of the house!") and eat Ruff's pizza.  The scene has a nice conclusion where Ruff decides Down Girl needs to go to dog training classes, and DG thinks it's a good idea because "Ruff has a lot to learn."

 

Then we shifted to "Digging for Dinosaurs," featuring Prehistoric Actual Size by Steve Jenkins.  For whole animal and projected them large on the screen, with a note on how close these are to actual size. 

 

this we just showed a few of the very cool life-sized illustrations, including some fold-outs.  The teeth of Giganatasaurus are especially nice.  To supplement it, we scanned the thumbnails from the back of the book that show the

 

Next up was "Digging Worms," and we took the easy way out for this one.  I just love the "Diary" books by Doreen Cronin and Harry Bliss, but could not think of anything we could do with Diary of a Worm that would be as good as the excellent Weston Woods film.  So we showed that on the screen.

 

One of our goals for this program is to check out multiple copies of the books we feature, so we only choose stuff that's pretty widely available in our county.  For "Digging Snakes," though, I went back to an old favorite:  "The Snake," which is a story in Gwot: Horribly Funny Hairticklers by

George Mendoza.  The book is long out of print (published in 1967, now $70+ on amazon), but I haven't had the chance to tell that story in a long time and decided I'd just take the opportunity.  Basically a farmer slices a snake in two and it comes back the next day twice as big and that keeps happening...I know, sounds kind of weird, but it really is a great oral tale, just funny enough and just gross enough.  Plus it works as a "stretch" if you have the kids stand up and "Thwack!" the snake each time. 

 

We were planning on finishing with "Digging Rabbits" and using Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens.  But a week or so before the event Sheila decided we just had to find a way to do Creepy Carrots, a recent Caldecott Honor book by Peter Brown.  We've been really busy and Tops and Bottoms was going to be easy since we had done it before, but sometimes the lure of a cool new book is just too hard to resist....so this became our "Digging Rabbits" book instead.  Details are in this separate post. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painting a Blue Horse with PowerPoint

Book:  The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse / El Artista Que Pintó un Caballo Azul by Eric Carle
Puppets:  None
Props:  Paint Brush (or broom)
Technology:  Projected Scans on Screen
Presenters:  Two (could be done with one)
Audience:  Family Storytime

We did an "Eric Carle" themed storytime recently.  Sheila's been taking Spanish classes and this seemed like a good story to do in both languages.  And since Carle's illustrations are so excellent and our crowds are too big to use the book, we did the scan and project thing, using some simple PowerPoint animation to add a bit of visual surprise.

We traced each animal on white paper and scanned that picture.  (We didn't scan the little window in the middle of the horse...that's me messing up on my copying and pasting).

Then we scanned the illustration from the book and line that up exactly even with the outline.  Then you do Animation / Appear / Fly In for the colored illustration.  If it "flies in" from right to left, and you set the time for a good 6 seconds, it looks like the outline is getting slowly filled by the colors.

So to tell the story, we'd show the outline, then I'd say "I wonder what color the artist is going to paint this animal?"  Sheila steps up with her artist clothes and a broom (to act as a giant paintbrush) and strokes along the screen as the color fills the animal.  So it kind of looks like she's painting it.

When the animal is filled in, I say the English words ("Blue Horse") and Sheila says the Spanish ones ("Caballo Azul") as the written words for both appear above the animals.

Simple to tell, and lots of fun.  I acted surprised the first few times the Artist painted an animal an unusual color, but then added comments like "I've never seen an orange lion before...but I love it!"  We do enough stories where getting something wrong is a joke, and we wanted to be sure the kids got the point that the colors the Artist chose were imaginative and creative, not "wrong" at all. 

For the last animal Sheila poked her broom/brush instead of stroking to convey the dot making for the polka dotted donkey.  A very nice touch by Carle to give us a bit of a surprise at the end....

Ninja Pigs and Perfect "Pork Chops"

Book:  The Three Ninja Pigs  by Corey Rosen Schwartz, Illustrated by Dan Santat
Props:  Wolf Hat (or similar), Pig Ears (or something like that), Fake Bricks, Pre-cut Stick, Martial Arts Clothes (or even a plain bathrobe would be funny)
Presenters:   Three
Audience:  K-2 (also works for Preschool, just not quite as well)

Even before I saw the book, I knew just from the title that there would have to be something fun we could do with The Three Ninja Pigs.  We decided to try it for our K-2 Book Adventures "Heroes and Villains" program.  It's a clever re-telling of "The Three Pigs," where each pig learns a martial art, but the first two don't stick with their training.  The third one's a girl and a good student, and she saves the day. 

For our three-person telling we decided to go with one person (Teri) as all three pigs.  Sheila was the Wolf and since the text rhymes and we wanted to get that just right, I was narrator.  We usually don't mind half-memorizing and acting out with a script, but Terri couldn't do that this time:  she had to have her hands free for Ninja moves.  The illustrations are also excellent, and give the kids a more tangible sense of what the book is all about, so we selected some of those and projected them as the story progressed.  We also threw in a bit of the martial arts terminlogy as visuals, and added word balloons for most of the dialogue.  For the script we trimmed a stanza or two just to fit our time slot.

With that in place, the story plays out pretty smoothly.  Terri borrowed an authentic Taekwondo Ki to wear from a co-worker.  She even learned an authentic move or two, but in the end she went for comical effect, and it was definitely funny.  I'm pretty sure "the cartwheel, the crescent, the crane" don't go quite the way she did them.

Pigs one and two battled Wolf briefly.  We projected a scan from the book, then clicked to add word balloons for their lines.  Then Pig Three demonstrated her skills.  Terri broke a stick (pre-broken ) and shattering bricks (cardboard ones, but still visually impressive).  This scares Wolf and he leaves without even coming to blows ("I love to eat ham / But I think I should scram / before she makes mincemeat of me").

We'll probably use this for Family Storytime as well, but K-2 is really the perfect audience, since they get most of the jokes, like when Pig Three performs a "perfect Pork Chop."  Younger kids will still get the heart of the story, though, and will love the silly action. 

A. Wolf and 3 Pigs, Acted Out

Book:  The True Story of the Three Little Pigs  by Jon Scieszka, Illustrated by Lane Smith
Puppets:  Sheep, Bunny, 3 Pigs
Props:  Wolf ears (or similar)
Technology:  Projector with scans (optional)
Performers:  3, but works with 1
Volunteers:  3 kids (optional)
Audience:  K-2

We featured Jon Scieszka in a K-2 Book Adventures a while back and decided to finish with The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.  The storytelling voice really makes the book, so we did it as an act-out and we mostly stuck to A. Wolf's narrative from the book, with a few extras.

 

Since we had the luxury of three tellers (Sheila, Terri, and I), we switched off in the role of Wolf/Narrator, passing on the wolf ears each time.  We introduced it by saying that all three of us wanted to be the Wolf, and since we couldn't decide, we would take turns.  And of course everyone knows:  tallest goes first.  So I started as A. Wolf, explaining about how "this whole Big Bad Wolf thing...is wrong."  With the line about "it's not my fault wolves like to eat cute little animals like bunnies and sheep," I hold up a puppet of each, turn my back to the audience and "swallow" them, turning back with them visibly stuffed under my shirt. 

 

Then I turn it over to Terri, passing the wolf ears to her, and she tells about how she accidentally "sneezed a great sneeze," and ate the first little pig.  We gave one volunteer from the audience apig puppet and a couple of lines to say, in this case:  "No! I'm not in!"  When Terri "sneezes a great sneeze" I grab the pig puppet off the child's hand and toss it in the air.  Terri eats it ("think of it as a cheeseburger just lying there"), stuffing it under her shirt.

 

We followed the same pattern with Sheila getting the second pig and me again, trying to get the third.  Each  time we have a child with a puppet, one good line to say, and the big sneeze and a pig puppet toss.  Along the way we throw in a few slides on the screen just for fun.  When Wolf tells what each house is made of, the first slide shows a mistake.  Plastic Straws instead of Straw;  Chicks instead of Sticks; and Blue Bricks instead of Red Bricks.  Wolf notices and corrects himself each time.  We also had slides for the mentions of Cheeseburgers and the Cup of Sugar at the beginning and showed the illustration from the Newspaper at the end, followed by a Jail slide.  These aren't necessary, but were fun, and we do like to mix our media when we get a chance.       

 

This is one tale where you really do have to be in character to pull it off. The audience has to listen to Wolf's excuses but also realize but Scieszka's words are so good, you can't really read them without becoming A. Wolf.  The whole story could be done just fine by one person, along with the kid volunteers for the pig.  Three tellers worked great for us, but we did miss out on one element: a solo teller's stomach would have gotten bigger and bigger with each puppet eaten, while we all kind of started from scratch each time.  These are the hard choices one must make when telling silly stories.     

The Simplest Elephant & Piggie for Puppets

Book:   I Am Going  by Mo Willems
Puppets:   Elephant, Pig
Props:   Food (optional)
Presenters:  One
Audience:   Storytime
Video:  How to Tell I Am Going with Puppets

Since our Family Storytimes are done with two storytellers, we've presented several "Elephant and Piggie" books as Act Outs, including I Broke My Trunk and Watch Me Throw the Ball.  Both of those stories would also work great as one person puppet stories, I'm sure.  But the simplest E & P to tell with one person and two puppets is I Am Going.  It's a short, simple tale with great opportunities for humor, both visual and personality-based.  

 

Willems sets the stage for all the drama by having E & P agree that "this is a good day." So when Piggie announces that she is going, Gerald's melodramatic responses are even funnier. 

Basically, Piggie tells Gerald the elephant that she is going, and he freaks out.  He asks who will do fun stuff with him...in the book it's Skip, Play Ping-Pong, and Wear Silly Hats.  I switched a couple of those to things that are more easily demonstrated with puppets.  Skip becomes "Dance":  my legless elephant puppet can't show skipping very well, but he can dance fine.  And Ping-Pong becomes "Play Ball":  he can hold a ping-pong paddle, but it's more fun to have him toss a ball in the air and catch it (or drop it...it works either way).  And he can do all three at once, as Gerald does in the book.

 

Another highlight is when Gerald declares that he is going too, though he's bluffing of course.  Puppet motions are simple here, as Gerald slowly walks away, stops, looks back, etc.  When telling with puppets, your eyes can help pace a scene like this.  When Gerald looks back to see Piggie's reaction (which is nothing), you can also look from your Elephant puppet, back to silent Piggie.  It's a subtle way of directing the audience's eye from one character to the other at the appropriate time. 

 

Gerald's attempt to have Piggie go later (tomorrow...next week...next year!) is fun in the book, with the illustration showing him tossing a calendar in the air.  I thought about doing this but decided it would be too distracting and a little more abstract than the other jokes.  So I just used the words, but no calendar prop. 

 

Gerald finally explodes with a blizzard of "Why??!!'s", another fun bit to do with puppets.  Though Gerald is pretty manic at this point, there's no need to overplay it, either with fast and wild motions or with an over-the-top craziness in the voice.  The kids know Gerald well enough by now and going far, but not too far with his overreaction works perfectly. 

 

Voice and expression are the key to telling this with puppets. Obviously Gerald is emotional and active, while Piggie is calm, quiet, and pretty still. The contrast in personalities is extreme, and it's tempting to make the dialogue exchanges quick...but better, I think, to slow it all down. Leaving a bit of a pause between Piggie's words and Gerald's responses gives the listeners a chance to anticipate.  Willems' illustrations pace his stories with moments of silence and responses, and kind of replicating these with puppets works very well. 

 

When Piggie finally reveals her reason for going ("lunch"), the story reaches its satisfying conclusion.  I have her bring out a basket of fake fruit and share with Gerald, but it would work just as well without a visual representation.  And the ending scene is another example of holding back a bit with the puppetry.  Instead of an immediate reaction, Gerald can do a slow, silent double take, looking at Piggie, then the audience, then back again.  So as he slowly realizes that he's been very silly, the kids have time to process it all too. 

 

For E and P I use a couple of puppets from my collection...my elephant vaguely resembles Gerald, but my pig is very un-Piggie like.  There are Elephant and Piggie puppet-making ideas on the web or you can buy plush dolls that I bet could be transformed into puppets pretty easily.  But really, it's the personalities and storytelling that carry the stories, so basic, close-enough puppets work fine.