Tan Tan Puppets

To celebrate Carnival the Doodlebugs and Picassos both made Tan Tan puppets! Of course the Doodlebugs had a bit more help putting theirs together but the beauty of this project is that it was simple enough for the little ones to tackle and yet it was also able to engage my older kiddos! 

They were all equally fascinated by the movement of the puppet but to put it into perspective we spoke about Peter Minshall's Tan Tan and Saga Boy and I even found an old video of their Dimanche Gras performance for the children to see them live in action! I also learnt that Machel Montano gets waaaay too much credit from these kiddos... when asked to guess who created Tan Tan and Saga Boy most of them were convinced it had to be Machel. lol! 

So today they got to explore that good old element of art - form, that we don't often get to delve into, but when we do it's always a Red bull kind of day, but in a good way! They made accordion legs and arms, created faces and clothes for their puppets and we helped the younger group stick the puppet parts together while the Picassos took on everything from start to finish, including using the glue guns under my close supervision... which they totally loved ;) While we worked we also talked about how much work it is to get a mas band put together and asked them to imagine all the people who make headpieces and other parts of costumes and what their jobs must be like! 

There may not be very many action shots because as you can appreciate we needed all hands on deck... as a matter of fact I didn't even get pics of most of my Doodlebugs with their completed Tan Tan Puppets :/ but we tried our best to show you a bit of what took place! Shout out to all the aunties, mamas, daddies and grandparents who took on the task of tying the strings for the Doodlebug puppets! A big thank you :)

​Happy Carnival everyone!