What Works-Pulling Strings

Librarians often know how well puppets can communicate with kids, but many tremble a bit at the idea of performing with puppets themselves. They think they'll feel silly, standing there with a puppet on their hands and talking in a funny voice.

There's no need to feel silly. In fact, for puppets to do their work most effectively, you must take your puppet character seriously. Whether depicting a frog or a princess, you must act as if he or she is real. Here's how to do it.

Use your voice. For puppets to communicate effectively, they must be heard and understood in a room filled with kids, and they must speak in distinct voices. If you want to be a puppeteer, you must train yourself to project your voice—to speak from your diaphragm, pushing all the air from the bottom of your lungs. Anyone with a drama or singing background should be able to help you with this skill.

To bring life to a puppet, you must create a voice that is at least slightly higher or lower, faster or slower, louder or softer, or different in quality from your own. The acid test: tape a conversation between you and your puppet character, or between two puppets. Can you easily tell the voices apart?

On the other hand, don't overuse that refuge of the embarrassed—the bird or mouse puppet who's "too shy to say anything," so it must whisper everything in the librarian's ear and have the librarian repeat it to the kids. Such puppets never become as real to kids as the ones who speak with their own voices and assert their own personalities.

Moving your puppet. Any puppet you use regularly should fit your hand comfortably, without being too loose or too binding. So don't hesitate to perform nip-and-tuck surgery on puppets that pinch or sag, and make sure to put any puppet through a range of motions before you buy it.

It's essential to make eye contact between your puppet and the kids, your puppet and yourself, and between different puppets. Have a colleague sit where the kids sit and tell you if the puppet ever turns its head and looks at them. Hint: keep most puppets' noses, beaks, etc., pointed down. It's also important to believably move the mouths of mouth puppets (puppets in which your fingers work the jaws). To do this, you must open your fingers every time you open your own mouth—but not too much. Pay special attention to moving your thumb (the lower jaw) down instead of your fingers (the upper jaw) up.

Get a puppet mascot. Every librarian who works with children below sixth grade should consider joining forces on some occasions—storytimes, circle times, introducing books—with a puppet mascot. A puppet mascot must be seen by the audience as a separate, living character with a personality unlike that of the librarian holding it. It should be treated as a living being. For instance, the puppet is not left hanging upside down from the librarian's hand when she's rebooting the PC, and it's not left out on a library table for everyone to handle. It is seen only when it is time for it to perform, when the puppeteer is ready to slip it on her hand and have it work its magic.

All of these techniques can also be used with older kids and young adults—you just need to use them in a developmentally appropriate way. The key with this audience is to give your puppet an attitude, to perform in a way that communicates to the kids, "You know this is a puppet, I know this is a puppet, but who cares?" You'd be amazed how well middle school kids will accept and enjoy a puppet when that puppet uses the same vocabulary they use and expresses the same cynicism they do.

Puppet mascots are also great as community ambassadors. Take them to school fairs, to preschools, and to community events, and let them tell everyone about the library and what a great place it is. It's funny—often people forget what the librarian tells them but remember what the puppet says. More than once, I've brought a puppet up to the microphone on school parent nights to tell bad jokes ("Why does the ghost keep coming back to the library for more books? She goes through them too quickly.") Quite simply, puppets help kids and parents remember you and your message.