It's not a sock!
Ever wondered what to do with odd or worn out socks? Recycle them into sock puppets. Making sock puppets is an easy, inexpensive craft that keeps your kids busy, encourages imaginative play and promotes the development of fine motor, creative and language skills.
What you need:
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An old, clean sock
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Materials for adding detail to your sock puppet
- e.g. colouring pens and pencils, construction paper or recycled card, bits of fabric, felt, ribbon, buttons, wool, googly eyes or anything else you can find.
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Scissors
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Glue (Top tip: White craft glue dries clear)
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Optional: A needle and some thread if you want to sew things onto your puppet.
What to do:
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Put your hand inside your sock and make a mouth shape with your fingers.
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Decide what you want your sock puppet to be. Think about where you want to add features to your puppet.
(Your puppet can be anything you want, e.g. an animal, a character from a story you have heard, or a character or creature that you have made up.)
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Use the materials you have collected together to add features for your puppet, e.g. glue, or sew, on buttons for eyes, glue on a piece of fabric for a nose
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Let your puppet dry.
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Have fun playing with your puppet/puppets. Maybe you will use it to retell a story or put on a puppet show.
Extension activity: Make props for your puppet show out of recycled boxes, pots, paper and fabric. Decorate them however you like.
(Top tip: Breaking boxes down to flat nets, then reconstructing them, inside out, and taping them back together makes them easier to decorate. See the image below.)
Why make puppets?
Making and playing with puppets provides your child with opportunities to:
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Develop fine motor and creative skills as they create, draw, cut out and decorate puppets.
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Be imaginative and creative as they use puppets to orally retell familiar stories, their own versions of stories, or stories they have made up.
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Develop language skills and explore different ways of interacting and communicating with others.
Puppet play encourages the development of speaking and listening skills. Through puppet play your child can be encouraged to orally retell stories, explore and empathize with characters in a story, and to improvise dialogue between characters.
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