puppets 101

I’ve mentioned a few times that I was involved with our church’s Music Camp this week. Our church hadn’t done Music Camp in at least three years, I think, so this was my first year to help out. I volunteered to help and expected to be doing something like making name tags or being a homeroom mom or helping with registration.

But this is just a great example of how God can take you out of your comfort zone and put you in a place that you don’t know much about. I was asked to teach the puppets class. Three thirty minute classes every day. I don’t know anything about puppets except that I’ve made some lunch bag puppets a few times and I used to love those big puppets that used to come to church and school and teach you about saying no to drugs. You know, like these guys.

Our church actually owns a handful of these kinds of puppets, but I wasn’t really sure what to do with them. What were they supposed to say or talk about? Or sing? I just didn’t have a clue.

The coordinator of the camp put me in touch with the woman that taught puppets at music camp for years and I met with her. I found out that she knows a whole lot about puppets and she gave me some terrific ideas.

I basically decided that the class would focus on crafting and making the puppets and then at the end of the camp we’d have the puppets we made do a puppet show. I spent the past couple of weeks gathering up the pieces for all of the puppets we would be making and basically cutting out puppet templates. I didn’t want the kids to have to waste their time cutting out all of the eyes, ears, noses, etc.

Puppet Project #1: Noah’s Ark Song

The song we used is by the Donut Man and it mentions five different animals and features those animals’ sounds that they make. So each of my campers made those five puppets this week. I’ve taken pictures of the monkey, the elephant, and the lion. The song also mentions a bear and a hyena but I didn’t have the examples at home.

We picked out a monkey “puppet” that’s really more of a monkey headband. And when the monkey makes the monkey noise on the song, the kids bobbed their heads around.

These puppets (with the exception of the monkey) were mitts that the kids wore on their whole hand. They didn’t have to mess with moving the mouths with their hands.

Puppet Project #2: The Dancing Puppy

This project was really fun. The puppy is basically a styrofoam ball stuffed into a tube sock with a dowel rod hot glued into the styrofoam ball. Once the tub sock is on, you can slide the cup onto the stick and wrap the sock around the bottom of the cup. You glue the little facial features and ears onto the puppy and you’ve got a dancing dog!

Supplies needed: styrofoam ball, 16 oz cup or can (cup needs to have bottom cut out/ can needs to have both ends removed), a tube sock with no heel, felt for ears, pom poms in three different sizes for the muzzle, nose, and tongue, and the little crafting eye balls.

Boudreaux wanted his turn with the dancing puppy

And that’s what I’ve been up to the last couple of weeks. It was fun and a real learning experience for me. I’m not sure if I’ll do puppets again next year because I’ll obviously have to come up with new ideas since most of the kids will be returning. But I do know that I’ll work it out if I end up doing it again.