A Shadow Puppet Nativity

As part of a school assignment I was having the kids condense a story into a short puppet show. The story of choice was A Christmas Carol and it turns out that condensing this story into five minutes was a lot of work. There were a lot of characters and scene changes and it felt like too monumental of a task (though the kids did write out a beautiful storyboard summary of the story) so I told them they could do the story of the nativity instead. They know that story better and can be told with just a few characters, so the kids (somewhat reluctantly) have been working on that project over Christmas break (but I strictly told them that they had to bring the project from start to finish because we'd already done a lot of work for our puppet show (we made the shadow box theatre last week) and because it simply feels good to complete a project).

So, this afternoon we finally got around to filming their shadow puppet production of the nativity:



You can probably expect to see more shadow puppet productions from this crew (because we went through all the work to make the shadow puppet theatre and because knowing how to retell a story is an important thing—knowing what details are pertinent, which details are extraneous, putting a story into your own words, and so forth (plus, perhaps if I force them to work together on projects often enough they'll eventually learn to get along (a girl can dream (and if you're watching this video, please ignore my children pestering each other and giving each other killer looks during the scene changes))).