Art for Kids: How to Make a Stick Puppet

Video Transcript

"In this clip, I'll show you how to make a rod puppet who can move and dance. For this project you need an empty cardboard box, a brown paper bag. A bit of stuffing for that brown paper bag. Some colorful card, a couple of wooden skewers. A length of bamboo pole. Felted pen and scissors and sticky tape. And if you have it, some tissue paper and scraps of fabric. We'll get the bamboo stick and we're going to make a collar around it. By wrapping a piece of scrap paper, round and round and round. This is going to stop the box, sliding up and down. So I'm going to secure it with some sticky tape. That goes right round it, very, very firmly. Wrap it tight around so just touching the scrap paper and touching the bamboo. Then it won't go up and down. Now then, this is going to be the body of the puppet. So we need to cut a small hole in the top. This is a grown ups job. Pushing into the top, we're just making a small hole in there. So the next job is putting the head on. Paper bag is going to become our head. So open it up, wide. And to make it a good shape, put a little bit of stuffing in it. I've to cut a bit more paper. And that should do the job. Pull your stuff together. Try to make the flat area, that will be the face. And then that's going to sit on to the bamboo. And again, we'll have to put a collar around that, of sticky tape. Wrapped around to make it nice and tight. To make sure, it really is the head. We'll draw us a nice, big eyes on it. There and there. And to do a nose, to draw a nose. I do a large number two. That looks like a nose. And nice, big smiling mouth on there. She needs a bit of hair, I think to look pretty. She's going to dance. So I've go this tissue paper, which is threaded. And we can put some on this side. Tape it on. And some on the other side, to match. If you've got some hair decorations. You could even put your own hair decorations on her hair. To make it look extra nice. For the arms, I'm just using pieces of ribbon. Which make sit quite easy. So get the end of the ribbon and tape it on to her shoulders. On the other side, ribbon, sticky tape around to the shoulder. And that's secure. Now then that's the shoulder and this must be the hand end. So for this, you need the little vegetable skewers. Some wooden skewers which you can use for food cooking in the kitchen. But for us, we're using it. So that her arms will move around. This puppet, this type of puppet is called a rod puppet. And these are the rods that help it to move. So I've got the sticky tape on to the rod. And then on to the ribbon. And the same at the other side. Then she can move and then she can wave at you. Yuhu...yuhu. We'll get a piece of paper. We'll see if we can make her a skirt. I'm just wrapping that around her tummy. And then she'll be finished. And our rod puppet might be able to do a little bit of moving. Sticky tape is a very useful thing to have handy. When you're doing jobs like this. But leave some of the yellow showing because it's very pretty. That you might be able to stick a few buttons on those. Some jewelry or draw your own pattern on it. On the front I'll just draw some button, buttons going down it. And hold her up. And there she is. Hello everybody. I'm called really nice and rod puppet. That boys and girls is how to make a rod puppet. It could be any character you want it. It could be a monster. It could be an animal. It could be one of your friends. You can make it whoever, you want it to be."