Paper Bag Animal Puppets

I think Paper Bag Puppets are an awesome craft for creative kids because they fill three important buckets: (1) They’re made with common materials that are likely already in our homes (2) It’s an open-ended craft that invites kids to create any animal from their imaginations (3) Children can include them in a puppet show or play, further encouraging pretend play.

Today I’ll share four paper bag puppets to spark your imagination. Feel free to use these ideas as you see them, or borrow them as a jumping off point for your own unique paper bag puppet creations.

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Supplies: Paper Bag Puppets

• Paper lunch bag/s
• Construction paper
• White glue
• Scissors
• Brush and jar for glue (optional)
• Markers (optional)

Prep: Paper Bag Puppets

• For little ones: precut shapes that could be turned into eyes, ears, beaks, noses, etc., and then invite your child to design with these shapes.
• Having a few precut shapes can spark ideas and encourage children to get started. Offer paper and scissors to older children, as they may enjoy cutting their own shapes.
• Have extra paper ready to cut in case your child has more ideas.

Prompt

To help spark your child’s curiosity, you could say something like: “Let’s use these paper shapes to turn our paper bag into an animal or something from our imaginations.”

Steps

• Choose shapes to represent different face and body features.
• Your child can glue shapes right away or move all the pieces into place before gluing.
• Glue the pieces down.
• Add more details with markers or even paint.
• When the paper bag puppet is dry, make a puppet show or have a pretend play party.

If you enjoy open-ended creative prompts and play invitations like this one, you’re invited to join me in TinkerLab’s membership program, TinkerLab Schoolhouse.

Schoolhouse members receive 5 weekly open-ended experiences, designed for children ages 3 to 8, that cover a range of media and concepts such as printmaking, collage, painting, science, and drawing. Each activity comes with a printable guide and short format video. Join us!

August 26 is National Women’s Equality day in the U.S.

In 1920, the United States Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women equal voting rights. The amendment declared: “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any other State on account of sex.”

Whether you live in the U.S. or somewhere else, equal voting rights are worth celebrating.

6 ways to celebrate National Women’s Equality Day with children:

Read Sofia Valdez, Future Prez (part of the Iggy Peck Architect series),Click here (affiliate). You can watch AJ Michalka read this story aloud, courtesy of the Women’s National History Museum.

Read Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for their Rights. Click here. (affiliate)

Become a Junior Suffragist with the National Park Service, with this workbook from the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument.

Try a recipe from the 1886 Women’s Suffrage Cookbook, which was used to raise money for the movement. It’s fun to flip through and see how recipes were written and read what ingredients were used (1 gallon of molasses + a pound of lard!).

Look at historical photos from the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington D.C.

Download these Women’s Equality printables (coloring pages and information sheets) to teach your child about this day from a child-friendly site.

STEAM (representing projects that integrate science, technology, engineering, art, and math) is an integrated teaching approach that engages learners to solve problems through problem solving, creativity, and critical thinking.

In today’s STEAM project, a prompt from our membership program, TinkerLab Schoolhouse, we’ll do two things:

1. Wonder along with children about the possibility of walking through a small piece of paper. (hint – scissors are involved)
2. Combine math and art to create a painted paper chain.

With a regular piece of printer paper in hand, we’ll start by saying something like…

“I wonder if we can walk through this piece of paper?”

By the way, I love using “I wonder…” questions because they can help even the most reticent children engage and have agency in the question at hand. Everyone likes to solve a problem.

After musing about it for a few minutes, you’ll likely come up with some zany ideas on how to squeeze your bodies through a small piece of printer paper, and then conclude that it’s not really possible.

Then you might share this nifty magic paper cutting trick that will open your child’s eyes to see that it could actually be possible to walk through the paper after all…

After cutting, you’ll end up with an enormous hole to walk through, like this…

Magic!

Now, you might notice that our paper has a rainbow effect happening, and that’s because we painted it first. You can do this if you like (I recommend it because, in my opinion, painting makes everything more festive and elevates the project from math to math + art).

However! You can first share this “I wonder…” question with unpainted paper to help your child understand the concept, and then set up another sheet with the painting prompt. And we’ll show you that next.

Here’s how to set up the painting prompt

Print out the Paper Chain printable (scroll to the end of this page for the printable link), and set up the page that shows half a sheet of lines next to:

• watercolor paint
• water
• a brush
• scissors
• and a rag (for drying the brush).

Then, invite your child to paint.

Once the paint dries, fold the page in half and cut along the grey lines (see the directions sheet that shows which lines to cut).

There are two ways you could cut this:

1. Cut the paper so you can walk through it (back to our original question)
2. Cut the paper to make a paper chain

We’ll give you directions on how to do both.

No worries if you don’t have a printer > Just take a look at the PDF and copy the concept on your paper with a ruler and pencil. It will work!

To make a festive party streamer that’s 1000 times better than anything you’ll find in the store, make multiple paper chains and tape them together, end to end.

Why is this math?

• Children will develop spatial reasoning: the ability to imagine things in three dimensions.
• Children will gain a sense of numbers as they count how many lines they’re cutting.
• Children will explore pattern as they understand how the pattern of lines contributes to the new shape of the cut paper.

Click here or the image below to view the 4-page Painted Paper Chain download (PDF)

If you can use more activities like this, we invite you to join us in TinkerLab Schoolhouse, our membership of weekly art and STEAM prompts for early childhood (age 3-8).

TinkerLab membership program, TinkerLab Schoolhouse, helps families with children 4-8 build a creative habit with weekly art and STEAM prompts.

TinkerLab Schoolhouse is a unique membership program that supports families who want….

• to develop a creative habit.
• a simple plan of creative activities to set up each week.
• their children to understand that mistakes are part of the learning process.
• to connect with other parents in a supportive community.
• to see their child confidently claim their inner artist.

Who is Schoolhouse for?

Schoolhouse is for families, with children 3-8, who want to develop a creative habit, have fun, save time, and feel more creative.

If you yearn to create with your child, find time for making, and nurture your child’s imagination, Schoolhouse is for you. While early childhood is our focus area, the weekly activities are open-ended, making them accessible to children (and adults) of all ages.

How does Schoolhouse work?

Our members come to Schoolhouse because they want to establish a meaningful creative practice at home. With the help of our weekly prompts, families learn how to easily set up process art projects, invitations to create, and STEAM activities. All of these simple entry points into the imagination give children room to explore, invent, and tinker.

Toward this end, members receive:

• five weekly inspiring, developmentally appropriate creative prompts (20+ prompts each month)
• the 4-step TinkerLab Journey to support their child’s creative growth
• access to a supportive community that cheers them on

How Can Schoolhouse Help You?

With the help of Schoolhouse, our members connect with their children, set up maker spaces, say “yes” to making, establish creative habits, enjoy the company of other families who are on a creative journey, and find more joy through making.

TinkerLab Schoolhouse helps families with young children establish a creative habit with a curated weekly prompt calendar, 4-step creative journey, & a supportive maker community.

Why is this important?

By establishing a weekly creative habit, we can encourage our children make choices, express their ideas, and understand that mistakes are part of the learning process.

With our open-ended prompts as starting points, children will harness the skills of agency, resiliency, and responsibility, which will ultimately guide them to thrive in their futures.

Spark your child’s curiosity and build a love for making and creating through joyful hands-on experiments.

Join TinkerLab Schoolhouse today