Integrated Arts involves residency programs that are correlated with ongoing school curricula to provide a unique teaching vehicle. Because of their flexibility and almost limitless variety, puppets can be used to represent almost any academic subject matter: trees, numbers, atoms, literary and historical characters, geographical objects, and…you name it. So, students can build puppets to represent any aspect of a subject and create a play to demonstrate what they have learned. This is this ultimate opportunity to use art as a universal teaching tool. An excellent example of this is Sesame Street .

In our Integrated Arts programs, we have used puppets to depict the Hopi Indian culture with shadow puppets at the Bradford Elementary School in Bradford , VT. At the Cornish Elementary School in Cornish, NH, we also used puppets to teach multiculturalism through travel, by creating a shadow puppet “airplane” with puppets of the students showing through the windows. They then placed themselves in another part of the world that they were learning about. The scenery they created was based on their reading about other cultures. The same thing can be done with science, math, and history.

These are self portraits in Hula skirts done by students at the Cornish Elementary School in New Hampshire

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