Kid's Craft: Paper Bag Puppets

When I was a child I remember making paper bag puppets.  They were so simple to make and we made them using items that we found around the house.  I thought that it would be fun for the boys to make these puppets because they enjoy using the glue and playing with my yarn.  With our Firefighter being gone on his shift and the weather being so hot and humid today, I decided that today would be a good day to try out this project with the boys.  These were the supplies that we used:

Brown paper lunch bag (any size and color paper bag would work)
Elmer's glue (poured in plastic cups that we had recycled from mandarin oranges)
Q-tips cut in half to help spread the glue
Yarn (cut into lengths to use for the hair)
Crayons
Markers
Not in the picture, be we also used stickers and construction paper
You can also use buttons, macaroni noodles or anything else that would dress-up the puppet

Once we had all of our supplies together we started our project.  I made up a quick puppet to show the boys what the puppet could look like, although I knew that their puppets would be unique!

This is my puppet.  It was not bad for something that I threw together real quickly as an example, however, wait until you see the boys' finished puppets!

 The boys were very excited to be able to use the glue.  They both grabbed their glue cups and their Q-tips and were ready to go.

They were both working so seriously.  G decided that the strips of construction paper were too long so he cut them shorter.  He likes to use the scissors so this mommy is thinking that he really just wanted to cut up the paper no matter what size it was.

G and M enjoy working on crafts.  M gets in, gets the craft done, seems to have fun doing it and then scoots back into the family room to play with his trucks, farm or fire station.  He enjoys just sitting there and making the figures move around and interact with each other.  He has quite the imagination and loves the imaginative play.  As is typical for M, he sat down, worked on his puppet and then went to play with his trucks.

Now our puppet family has grown to two puppets.

G is a different story.  He enjoys imaginative play but he loves hands-on activities like crafts.  He is the one who always wants to help me in the kitchen, with the cleaning or anything else that I am working on.  He also likes to help our Firefighter with the lawn.  M likes it too, however, he helps for a little while and then goes right back to his imaginative play.  It is amazing to me how two brothers can be so focused on what they like to do but yet those interests are so different from brother to brother.

Anyhow, I digress so back to the puppets...since G likes the hands-on activities he continued working on his puppets after M went back to his trucks.  The most fun I think that he had was cutting the yarn and gluing everything onto his puppet.  M liked the glue too and was even gluing his stickers on his puppet.

G cut alot of yarn.  We will have plenty of yarn hair for many, many puppets in the future!

Our family of puppets has now grown to three!

In the meantime, M came back into the kitchen and he decided to make another puppet.

G was more than happy to help M with his second puppet!

G decided to make a second puppet too.  He would cut the yarn and have me glue it onto his puppet for him so that he could keep cutting more yarn.  There was yarn all over the next puppet and the puppet after that too.

Our paper bag puppet family ended up growing to six members by the time the craft supplies were put away!  The boys really enjoyed using their imaginations and being creative with this project.  It was a nice project that was a short and easy set-up and clean-up.  Now when our Firefighter returns home from his shift he will be greeted not only by myself and the boys but our six paper bag puppets will be sitting on the table waiting for him too!