"Who Speaks for Wolf?" puppet

The Spirit Play class heard and saw the "Who Speaks for Wolf?" story a couple of Sundays ago. It was a hit. At this congregation, environmental issues are felt very powerfully, and I have found that what the "Big Church" makes its priority and passion, so too will be felt by the young folks.

I got the template for this wolf at a French primary school's website that Google translates--preciously--to "a small corner of shares." With the particular puppet, we tried three different art media: markers (on the face), colored pencils (tail), and watercolors. We had two choices of brads--large gold ones, seen here, and small silver ones.

One special work choice that we had for this story was the making of wolf puppets. Two of the six children chose to work on these together. One nice thing about these particular puppets was that the pieces were moveable, so we could open up a discussion about how wolves--and dogs and coyotes and foxes--use their tails to communicate with each other; we could move the tail up and down to illustrate the idea. The story focused on the idea that caring humans need to take it upon themselves to speak for wildlife in matters of human affairs that will have an impact on the earth. But through this work choice we also could broaden the conversation to bring in the idea that animals often have sophisticated and nuanced ways of talking to each other.

Our second special work choice that, again, two of the six children chose, was working on a coloring page that had a stained-glass style picture of a wolf. It occurred to me that with themed coloring pages, and with our RE hour being just before service, it might be nice to have a few clipboards set up with these to color during service itself.