Making a paper puppet - a #LW2025 takeaway

 

At Language World on Saturday I enjoyed the two talks about puppets that I went to.  In particular I'd like to thank Lavinia Dos Remedios, who showed us how to make a puppet out of a piece of A4 paper.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I am very keen on making things with one piece of A4 paper, namely minibooks, so this was right up my street!

Above, you can see a short video of the puppet that I made during the session and quickly decorated to look like a Moomin, in honour of Lisa Stevens and the box of biscuits I just ate, ahem.

Here is the YouTube video that Lavinia referenced with the instructions on how to make the puppets:

Language World 2025 #LW2025

I returned yesterday from the 2025 Language World Conference with a head full of information and ideas, and a notebook full of notes.  Well, full-ish of notes, as there were some sessions (for example the ones I was chairing) that I decided to just listen to.

The title of my talk was A rich tapestry of adaptable lesson ideas!  (The theme of the conference prompted a lot of weaving and stitching analogies as well as AI-generated pictures of the same!)

I had time to talk about 20 different activities:

1. Which one do I not say?
2. Sentence builder bingo
3. Listening Chests
4. Pointing game
5. Trapdoor/Cluedo
6. Sit down when yours is different
7. Working off the grid
8. Guess my sentence
9. Listen read write
10. Rapping
11. Dialogues
12. Messing around with text
13. Describing a poster
14. Odd one out
15. Analysing text
16. Post-It grids
17. Pair writing
18. Pictogram sentences
19. Dice roll activities
20. Kim's game
    

You can read more about these activities and 100 others here.

Here are my notes from some of the other sessions I attended: