Turning a Story Book alive : D-I-Y Puppet Theater and puppets

Imagination is a beautiful gift of childhood. 

With a growing collection of books, my 5-year-old is an avid reader. She loves reading through sight words and phonics and has gotten so good at it. Taking a cue, we have increased her stash of Read-it-yourself books. 

Meanwhile, her winter break project from school has been to make some puppets of their favorite story characters. 

She chose her story and wanted to make puppets of 'The Tortoise and The Hare' from Aesop's Fables.

As back to school got nearer, I got wondering whether a small puppet theater would interest her. She absolutely loved the idea. And here's what we made. 

That's a old tissue box, of which the front has been cut out. Some printed stock images for the back ground.

The images of a forest are to be glued on the insides to form a story back ground.

Some tissue paper mache. Lots of cutting and sticking. We used a watered down white glue for the purpose. Leave to dry overnight. P.S. And no we didn't do all the gluing and cutting over that pretty rug of mine.

Once completely dry and stiff , add a coat of color all over. Notice that lovely texture that paper mache gives. The idea was to get a feel of a wooden log .

This is the front. We added some paper mache to replicate grass on the inside bottom too.

Next some lovely animal cutouts from stock images. Few trees to add layers and depth to the theater. My daughter dutifully colored the main charachters - the tortoise and the hare.

Now two slits at the top one for the tortoise (bottom straight) and one for the hare. The hare has a little stop over near a tree where he takes a nap.

Time to bring in the actors.Tape our tortoise and the hare to two long wooden skewers which go through the slits in the box.

See that prize over there, guess who is going to win it? Time to get ready for the show.

Small and easy for her to handle, with simple stuff lying around the home we managed to create a puppet theater which is probably going to have unlimited shows, as we read her currently favorite story. 

This was the first time we did 'Paper Mache' at home, and that was a hit with all the glue and tearing and the mess of course. 

She carried the project with pride to school. 

Guess I need to stock up on used tissue paper boxes or any other box for that matter. We've got a lot of stories to read and many tissue box theaters to make :).

FARZ

This post is linked to 

Made for Kids-17 @The Resourceful Mama

Wordless Wednesdays @Tots and Me

        A little bird told me Linky party @ Natural Beach Living