Stick Puppet Creativity

Making stick 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:

• Recycled cardboard (from food packaging or boxes) or card-stock
• Pencil
• Scissors
• Materials for adding detail to puppet; e.g. colouring pens and pencils, recycled wrapping paper, construction paper, bits of fabric, ribbon, kitchen foil, buttons, wool
• Glue (Top tip: White craft glue dries clear)
• Tape
• Straw, strip of thick cardboard, lollipop stick, stick etc. to fasten to the back of the puppet

What to do:

1. Decide what puppet you want to make and draw it on a piece of card. 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.

2. Cut out the puppet you have drawn.

3. Decorate your puppet in any way you like, e.g. colour it in or stick bits of paper/fabric on it.

4. Let your puppet dry.

5. Put your puppet, decorated side down, on a flat surface.

6. Position a stick on the back of the puppet. (the top of the stick should be near the middle of the puppet.)

7. Tape the stick onto the back of the puppet.

8. Have fun using your puppet/puppets to retell stories 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:

• Develop fine motor and creative skills as they create, draw, cut out and decorate puppets.

• Be imaginative and creative as they use puppets to orally retell familiar stories, their own versions of stories, or stories they have made up.

• Develop language skills.

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.

Reading and writing skills can be developed by encouraging your child to create storyboards or write playscripts of their puppet show stories.

Puppet shows are a great way of introducing your child to the genre of playscripts. Puppet play provides opportunities for you to read and perform playscripts (matched to your child's ability) alongside your child. Talk about how dialogue is expressed in a play script, how the scene is set, how the storyline is made clear.

Write a playscript together that retells a familiar or original story.

Think about these playscript features when writing your playscript:

• Is there a cast list?
• Is there a narrator?
• Are the speaker's names recorded on the left-hand side of the page?
• There are no speech marks.
• Did you start a new line for each new speech?
• Stage directions should be written in brackets.
• Does your playscript have scenes?

Encourage your child to write their own playscript and perform it as a puppet show, either on their own, or collaboratively with siblings or peers.