For centuries people from around the world have celebrated storytelling and puppetry for their educational and social functions. In the comprehensive curriculum, storytelling combined with puppet performances enriches the classroom experience by providing students with opportunities to engage in open dialogue, creativity, and structured play. Artist Pablo Cano's favorite story stems from his childhood, when his mother, Margarita Cano, wrote him a story in 1968 about a boy named Calum who visits an art gallery filled with master artworks. The story inspired Cano's marionette production, "The Blue Ribbon," in which Cano has transformed 10 inspiring master artworks and the boy Calum into marionettes. In this article, the author discusses how to incorporate Cano's marionettes into the classroom to motivate and inspire children to learn by having them explore their identities through brainstorming activities and the development of journal pages that include written and artistic reflections about topics that are important to them. Learning from artists--like Pablo Cano--can captivate students' imaginations and encourage them to take learning into their own hands as they address relevant themes such as appropriation, culture, identity, and recycling to connect what they learn about artists and their art to their own personal lives. By studying Cano's use of appropriation, students learn how artists from the past and present visually communicate their ideas, and in the process they use problem-solving skills by transforming found objects into something new--original art. (Contains 7 figures and 3 endnotes.)