Guest Author - Terrie Lynn Bittner

Puppets are a wonderful way to add variety to your family home evenings, to enrich your homeschool, or to help your children develop creativity and confidence. They needn’t cost much but time, and the supplies can be created by the entire family, working together.

Begin by deciding on your stage. You can, of course, purchase a puppet theater, but they are so easy and inexpensive to make that you may not want to waste your money doing so. By making your own, you can get exactly the features you want. When my children were in preschool, the teacher simply placed a tension rod in a doorway that had a curtain strung over it. This was an easy and removable theater. Children are also perfectly content with a coffee table or card table turned on its side. Little ones are even willing to do their shows right in the middle of the living room, with no stage at all. Children can kneel behind their beds, a cupboard door or anything else that blocks them from view.

If you prefer to build a theater, you can use a large cardboard box with a window cut into it. A single child, or two small ones, can sit inside the little house. For more children, cut a doorway in the back. When my children were young, my husband made a theater for them out of plywood. He hinged three boards together. The outer boards folded toward the back to make it stand. The center section had a window cut from it and we hung curtains in it. The entire theater folded nearly flat and stored behind a door. You can paint the theater with chalkboard paint so children can draw scenery onto the boards.

Once you’ve chosen a theater, it’s time to get some puppets. Commercially made puppets are usually fairly expensive, although you sometimes find them at thrift stores and yard sales. Children often like to do shows with stuffed animals and dolls. It is also extremely easy to make puppets, even if you aren’t artistic at all. Brown paper lunch bags make perfect puppets. Let children add faces and yarn hair, along with any other decorations they like. Following are several links to web pages with puppet directions, some of which are better made by adults.

Danielle’s Place

This is a Christian site with patterns for sock puppets, for a moose from paper cups and paper bags, black bird paper bag puppets, and a shepherd puppets. There are additional puppet instructions on the page, and there is a link to puppets that can be used in religious classes.

Enchanted Learning

These puppets use ordinary supplies you have around your house, such as paper plates and ordinary paper. Includes a pattern for a marionette.

Family Fun

This Disney site is very complete, with puppet instructions (even edible puppets), theaters, and scripts.

To make puppets for family home evening, search LDS.org for flannel board patterns. They have many scripture people patterns. Type the words “puppet patterns” into the search, limiting the search to the friend. You can also type in “Scripture figure.” The Friend did a series of generic scriptural characters for use in family home evenings. Glue these to Popsicle sticks or other materials to make puppets to use in telling your flannel board story.

Next week, we’ll discuss how to put on a show.