Puppeteering With Seng
During quarantine, forensics teacher Carol Seng asked her son to take ventriloquism lessons with her as a Mother’s Day gift, but what started as a nice favor, turned into a personal interest for her.
“By July, my son was over it and I was wanting more, so I took a trip out to Los Angeles to visit my brother and went looking for a ventriloquist teacher, which I didn’t find,” Seng said. “I did find a puppeteer, so since I decided that I needed to learn how to manipulate a puppet, I signed up for some lessons.“
Shortly after taking puppeteering lessons, Seng thought it would be a good idea to incorporate her skills in the classroom.
“I got the idea of puppetry and ventriloquism when I was trying to figure out how to entertain students when they started to come back to school after a year and a half of distant learning,” Seng said. “ I am looking forward to learning how to throw my voice when doing my skeleton and crime scene victim talk to the students.”
Currently, Seng owns two puppets. One of them is a rat named ‘Laraby’ and the second one is a monster named ‘Claudia Jean’. She incorporates both puppets in her forensics class lessons.
“I decided on Lab Rat B261 [for the rat puppet], since that was my classroom number,” Seng said. “Then the name came about when I looked at the initials of ‘LRB’ and thought of the name ‘Laraby’. [The other puppet’s full name is] Sara Aurelia Roberta Batu Etsal Sharif Valentino Geta Chiquita, but she also goes by Claudia Jean.”
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