Finger Puppet Materials

Series Summary

Crafts are an important part of teaching children. They can improve a child's imagination, bolster and accelerate a child's creative development, and help them learn certain concepts in a fun and interesting way. Whether making hand turkeys from brown construction paper for Thanksgiving, building the world's largest Popsicle stick sculpture, or just making a mess of construction paper scraps, crafts are a good way to keep the kids busy and help them learn and have fun.

In this free video series our expert Karen Weisman will walk you through creating interesting finger puppets that everyone can enjoy. Karen will talk about the materials and tools necessary for creating these delightful crafts. You'll learn all about making both popsicle puppets and finger puppets. She'll then show you how to create a variety of puppets from flying fairies and scary dragons to childhood story favorites like Little Red Riding Hood. Karen will help develop your craft skills and show you how your imagination is the only limitation.

Video Transcript

"Today I'll show you step by step how to make all of these great finger puppets. We'll be making sticker puppets, felt puppets; fun foam puppets, and straw and bead puppets. You can use these puppets with a table top puppet theater. Look for our show on making your own table top puppet theater. To make our super easy Popsicle stick puppets, what you'll need is your favorite stickers; some characters or animals or anything your child loves. You'll need some Popsicle sticks, some card stalk; scissors and glue. Here are some of our Popsicle stick puppets, you can make them out of any kind of characters or animal stickers and you can even make them out of a drawing that your child has made. This ones made a drawing; this is a homemade puppet on a pencil. A little tape and a picture. You can even cut out characters from packaging or coloring books, anything will do. Now lets get started, all you need first is to choose your sticker; I'm going to choose a fairy from our fairy collection here and I'm going to just stick her onto a piece of card stalk. I'm using the white side of this card stalk, the other side is colored. I'm using the white side. If you have a clear sticker you want to use the white side. This is not a clear sticker, but I'm still using the white side just so no color will show threw. And then you stick the sticker onto card stalk and just cut around it. And you don't have to cut so carefully around it, most stickers have a little bit of border around it; just trim it off as much as you like. This is something a child can do, also; that it's good for children to work with scissors. And you can just cut around it, you can leave the feet there or you can clear that out also. And then you just simply take a Popsicle stick, dab it with a little bit of glue; you don't want to much glue. And then stick that right on there and let it dry. And then you have a great little puppet for your table top puppet theater."