Saturday, September 21, 2013

Glove Puppets

Making up stories is a favorite in our house. I love telling the kids stories in bed at night and adding little sneaky lessons to learn or including a challenge we had that day. It is a way they will listen and learn without pushing the idea away. 
Emma has become quite the little story teller herself. I love to see her imagination endlessly create and watch her confidence grow. We made a fun hand puppet to add to her story telling fun. She really enjoyed making her puppets and she especially enjoys using it while telling stories. The puppet also seems to get the attention of Grayson and really engage him in the story.
 Emma's teacher recently said he uses a puppet to talk to the class and that the kids really listen to this puppet. It made me giggle (mostly because I would love to see him chatting to the kids in a "puppet voice,") but also because it is amazing what a silly puppet or even just a silly voice can do when you are dealing with children. I think it is a genius idea and I may start walking around my house with an assortment of puppets to parent my children. Just imagine the things we would accomplish in this house!

 On to the hand puppet instructions.

Materials:
foam sheets
new kitchen sponges
googly eyes
tacky glue
child size glove
scissors

 Emma decided on going with a theme. You could do anything really, but she wanted--The Three Little Pigs. We cut the sponges into round faces for the pigs and wolf and even made a little house.

 Next, we cut foam pieces to be our details on our puppet faces. We added them onto each sponge with a little glue.

 You could use foam for eyes as well, but we went with googly eyes.

 The faces are added to each finger of the glove with tacky glue, but be sure to have something in the fingers of the glove to prevent them from sticking together. We used the foam sheet scraps, paper would work, too.
Once each finger puppet was in place I set a heavy book on top of the glove to be sure our puppets dried in place.

The next day we were ready for some story telling puppet theater! This has been such a good tool for both my kids to build confidence and spark those beautiful imaginations.

For more details, I shared this over on Kiwi Crate.

5 comments:

  1. Popping in from Mummy Monday's, love your blog name! And this is such a cute craft. Great idea!

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  2. Oh my gosh, how cute! I never would have thought of using sponges to create finger (glove) puppets! This post is definitely inspiring me to do something like this with my girls (ages 5 and 3) I think they would love it!
    Please visit me over at Sunnysweetlife.blogspot.com if you have a chance!

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  3. I love this craft - it doesn't require a lot of prep and the results are so precious. It's so great when children create and retell their own stories! Thanks for sharing with Afterschool!

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  4. Those are adorable! Thanks so much for sharing this fun craft at After School.

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  5. Sponges make great finger puppets! I would have NEVER thought of that. What a great craft that has so many possible extensions, story telling, story writing, etc. Awesome! Thanks for sharing at the After School Linky.

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