How to Make a Puppet With an Explorer Theme

Kids can create puppets to mimic many explorers, such as Christopher Columbus.

Interacting with a puppet can be effective for a wide range of reasons, from education to entertainment. Creating a puppet with your own hands can heighten how you experience and enjoy it. Protean by design, a puppet can assume any identity or concept, including an explorer theme. Research into the history of explorers helps you to mine ideas for your puppet's design and appearance. Attention to detail can make your explorer-themed puppet feel true to life.

Things You'll Need

• Googly eyes
• Buttons
• Beads
• Fabric
• Yarn
• Crayons
• Construction paper

Instructions

1. Research an explorer to replicate. Pay particular attention to their sartorial choices. Neil Armstrong donned a space suit, for instance; Sacajawea wore pigtails and round, flat earrings. These details will influence your puppet's decorative touches.

2. Create a character sketch, in which you imagine your puppet's eyes, nose, a smile or frown, or other key details of the face. You can also decide on potential options for hair or a hat. Look to your explorer research as a guide for what to include in this sketch. Refrain from etching these decisions in stone; as you work on the puppet, new ideas for its face or styling may result.

3. Create a head for your puppet. You can use a variety of objects commonly found in a home or kitchen; potatoes, Styrofoam balls or cups, or a colorful sock are all smart options. Glue googly eyes onto your puppet's head. Use a small button or black bead as a nose. Consult your character sketch to include other relevant character details onto the puppet's face.

4. Continue to decorate your puppet according to the explorer it represents. For a William Clark puppet, for example, cover your puppet with brown fabric, to serve as a jacket. Cut several equally short lengths of brown yarn. Glue them onto your puppet's chest area to signify fringe for the jacket. Draw a picture of a coonskin hat with crayons and construction paper. Cut it out, and attach it to the puppet's head.

5. Treat your puppet like an actor or actress in costume. Puppets should instantly convey their identity and personality. Practice moving your puppet with your hand, and develop a voice for your puppet. Consider giving a Vasco da Gama puppet, for example, a soft Portuguese accent, representative of his native background.

6. Explore more complex types of puppets, if you're an older kid or adult. Shadow puppets and marionettes, in particular, can be well adapted to an explorer theme. Shadow puppetry entails the creation of a flat hand puppet in the silhouette of an explorer. Marionettes are puppets with full bodies and limbs that are controlled from above by strings, for which you can design sophisticated explorer costumes.

References

• Explorers of the Millennium: Explorers' Hall of Fame
• BoingBoing: Maker Jim Henson in 1969: How To Make a Puppet
• ProjectPuppet.com: Adding Facial Features to Your Puppet Characters Tutorial
• Heritage Costumes: William Clark Explorer Patriotic Costume
• Teach Kids How: Teach Your Child How to Make Puppets

Resources

• Enchanted Learning: Vasco da Gama: Explorer
• The Bob Baker Marionettes
• Oregon Shadow Theatre: What is Shadow Puppetry?