Create Your Own Paper Puppet Station Summary
Families and children work together to create a paper puppet craft. This puppet can be used when reading future stories to act out what is heard.
Cognitive Benefits
Puppets can tell stories on their own (with a little help from you) or make a book come to life. Puppets are also a great tool for teaching rhyme in early literacy development (Durand, 2017).
Children love to have ‘conversations’ with a puppet. Each verbal interaction with their puppet will encourage language development (Mcilroy, 2020).
Social and Emotional
Early learners can take on different characters and often shy children interact more easily as their puppet persona (Durand, 2017).
A supportive puppet can model social interactions, like ways to ask to play with a toy. Get children to act out their feelings or voice their fears or frustrations to a puppet (Durand, 2017).
The purpose of the puppet is to create interaction, fun dialogue and even an element of surprise into your play and learn activities (Mcilroy, 2020).
A puppet can be the voice used to correct table manners or other social skills. The puppet becomes the instructor and children often enjoy listening to the puppet teaching them to be sociable. It is not mom or dad’s voice setting the rules again, but a funny puppet character (Mcilroy, 2020).
Motor Development
By making hand and finger puppets move, talk and dance and more, kiddos are not only tapping into their imagination and creativity, but they’re also working on their fine motor skills at the same time (Port Discover, 1970).
At Home Strategies
Sing Hickory Dickory Dock, or any other nursery rhyme
Create a puppet and act out the song
References
Durand, S. (2017, September 26). 5 Reasons Early Learners Love Puppets. Retrieved June 1, 2020, from https://www.geteduca.com/blog/why-early-learners-love-puppet-play/ 
Mcilroy, T. (2020, May 4). The Amazing Benefits of Playing with Puppets in Early Childhood. Retrieved June 1, 2020, from https://empoweredparents.co/playing-with-puppets/ 
Port Discovery Children's Museum. (1970, January 01). Puppet Play Tips for Parents. Retrieved July 17, 2020, from https://www.portdiscovery.org/news-room/puppet-play-tips-parents

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