How to Make a Monkey Hand Puppet

Arts and crafts are an excellent way of giving children structure, as well as enriching their creative skills. A popular way to spend quality time with your children or your class if you're a teacher, is to help them make these easy-to-construct sock puppets.

Things You'll Need

• 1 pair of brown men's dress socks.
• 12-inch by 12-inch square of brown felt
• 8-inch by 8-inch square of peach felt
• Nontoxic craft glue
• Child-safe felt scissors
• 4 plastic google eyes (found in craft stores)
• Large disposable tablecloth
• 1 white crayon

Instructions

1. Spread the disposable tablecloth over your work surface to protect the table or desk from being stained. Lay out all of your materials.

2. Fold your 12-inch by 12-inch square of brown felt in half, and along the fold draw a half-circle. Make this about the size of a silver dollar. Draw another half-circle next to the previous one.

3. Using the safety scissors, cut the half-circles out of the felt, cutting through both layers of the folded material. Then, cut through the crease of each piece. This will leave you with four half-circles about an inch in diameter and an inch in length. Repeat these steps using the peach-colored felt, making the half-circles smaller in size by half.

4. With the remaining brown felt, draw out the tail of the monkey, but make it no thicker than one inch and no longer than eight inches. Cut out the tail.

5. Place a brown sock over your hand, and situate it so that the toe-seam of the sock is aligned with the bottom part of your knuckles. Mark the seam area with your crayon. This will be the monkey's mouth region.

6. Remove the sock, and lay it out in front of you, folding it where you marked it with the crayon. Take the four pieces of brown felt and the four pieces of peach-colored felt and glue them together. The peach pieces should be inside the brown pieces, as these are the ears.

7. Glue the ear pieces to the top of the sock, about three inches above the mouth fold. Make sure to use only two or three small dots of glue, and only put glue on the bottom part of the ears so they can still move freely.

8. Glue one end of the brown felt tail to the back of the sock, in the area that would likely be the back of your wrist. Then glue the google eyes to the front of the puppet. Make sure no more than an inch separates the eyes and that they are located an 1 1/2 inches above the mouth.

Tips & Warnings

• Experiment with different colors of felt and even construction paper, to customize your monkey hand puppet.

• Never leave kids unattended when working with glue or scissors