The following post is from Kristina of Toddler Approved:
The anchor text: We love reading books and have fun creating book-inspired activities and crafts. One of our favorite ways to make books come alive is by making puppets. Puppets are fun to create and a fabulous way to help kids practice retelling stories and learning about sequencing and other important story elements. Also, many children are given homework to create such toys, and for example, if your teenager has problems with that, do not hesitate to help with homework because the use of such services will give your student a lot of benefits and help in learning.
Today, we wanted to share a quick and easy way to make book-inspired puppets using popsicle sticks. These puppets can feature your child’s favorite children’s book characters.
Supplies:
- popsicle or craft sticks (we used ice cream sticks for ours)
- markers
- Elmers glue
- floss or yarn
- pencil
- colored cardstock
- scissors
- tape
- googly eyes
Instructions:
Grab some popsicle sticks and start creating! We colored the sticks first and then added details using glue.
My daughter decided to design a monster (like the one in Go Away Big Green Monster by Ed Emberley).
It is fun to draw parts of the characters’ bodies on cardstock, cut them out, and add details with markers. If your child is good at drawing, you can use a set of watercolor brushes and paints instead of markers. Once the characters are detailed and cut out, just add some glue and stick them to the popsicle sticks! As you can see below, my daughter had fun coloring the sticks and adding googly eyes to her monster popsicle stick puppets.
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus is one of our favorite books by Mo Willems, so we had to make a pigeon puppet. I drew the pigeon’s body on cardstock, cut it out, and then my son helped add his eyes and a few other details (yarn feet, a white stripe on his neck).
source: Kristina Buskirk
We’ve also been reading a lot of Dr. Seuss books because his birthday is coming up (March 2nd), and we are spotlighting him as part of our Virtual Book Club for Kids this month as well. We decided to make some puppets to help us tell some of our favorite Seuss stories.
Once our puppets were dry, we grabbed our books and read and re-read them while making the puppets read along or act out the story for us. Puppets can be used to help teach simple spatial relationship words like over, under, up, and down, and they can also help kids learn more about the characters in a story and their actions.
Puppet making is addictive, and pretty soo,n your kids might want a book-inspired puppet to hang out in ALL of their books
Here are a few of our favorite book-inspired activities:
- Recreate 10 Apples Up On Top by I Can Teach My Child
- Charlotte’s Web Sensory Bin by Mommy & Me Book Club
What is your child’s favorite book character?
| Kristina is a mom of 2 and a former Special Ed teacher for children with communication disabilities. She blogs at Toddler Approved as she looks for ways to make life a little more fun and creative with her kids while embedding learning into everything that she does. Kristina tweets as @ToddlerApproved and can be found on FB and Pinterest. | |
