About Acorn Garden Puppetry
Jennifer Aguirre lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Sonora, California, the northern gateway to Yosemite National Park. She has been teaching and developing a grades puppetry curriculum at the Sierra Waldorf School since 1998 and bringing puppet performances to the kindergarten(s) and festival life of the school since 1993.
She has developed eight different themed Puppet Pocket Story Aprons and has enchanted young audiences with her puppets for over 20 years in a variety of venues such as the Strawberry Music Festival, the High Sierra Music Festival, the Hoe’s Down Festival and Pinecrest Lake. She lives in a restored Gold Rush era home with her husband, Chris, where they raised their two grown children. Jennifer enjoys teaching the puppetry arts to adults at ECE conferences and smaller workshop venues.
Jennifer saw her first puppet show when she was 4 years old performed in a garage by older children within her idyllic central valley California neighborhood. She was enchanted by the puppet show and it sparked a desire to explore puppetry throughout her childhood. At age 12, Jennifer wrote a script and designed a flat hand puppet made from felt and sewn by machine, a skill she learned from her mother. The story was called, Grimach and Gretchen Meet the Baseball Eater, and Jennifer performed it with her neighborhood friends and sister to a younger audience in a front lawn setting. The puppets and script survive to this very day and Jennifer shares them with her 8th grade students annually. A family friend hired Jennifer to utilize the puppet design to make sets of story puppets for a preschool. Jennifer continued to make puppets well into her teen years but her puppetry pursuits basically slumbered for many years until Jennifer had her first child and discovered the beauty of the puppetry in Waldorf Education. Enchanted with puppetry once again, Jennifer began to create puppet shows for her children and well…it grew and grew from there. Of course with a little help and inspiration from her friends.
At present, Jennifer is writing a book about her Puppetry Grades Curriculum.