9 Ways to Tap into Puppet Play

Puppetry is an easy way to bring engaging playfulness into teaching and learning.

Here are nine simple ideas to get you started.

To a child, anything that you make move is alive.  No eyes or fluffy ears necessary.  A pencil can be a puppet.  Make a mouth with your fingers, and your hand becomes a puppet.  Children are enthralled.  I fondly remember a first grader asking me, “Wait a minute, are you making him talk?”  Guilty! 

Harnessing children’s imagination through puppetry is charmingly engaging, and having children use their own puppets is a magic.  Here are nine ideas to get you started.

Play with puppets for presenting content.  

1.     Draw Attention to a Visual. Have your puppet (or stuffed animal) point to your visual for you.

2.     Teach/ Review Classroom Expectations. Let a full-bodied puppet (Folkmanis makes beautiful, affordable puppets) review and model “whole-body listening” or show how to (and how not to) line up at the door.

3.     Reinforce Reading or Lesson Comprehension. Let a puppet ask students questions following a book or lesson.

4.     Enhance Virtual Learning. Puppets can very simply transform your virtual teaching and presentations.

Invite students to play with puppets during lessons.  The “puppet” can be any small object, or just their own hand.

5.     Retell with a Puppet. Let students’ puppet retell a story to themselves or to another student’s puppet.

6.     Reinforce Task Accountability. Have their puppet check if their work is completely finished—“If your puppet sees your page is all complete, let it nod.  If it is not quite finished, let your puppet shake its head and show you where you need to keep working.”  

7.     Solidify Learning. Have a student’s puppet explain to another student (or to an object on the student’s desk or to the student themselves) how to solve a problem, the life-cycle of a seed—any concept or content!

8.     Grow Executive Function Skills. Have a student’s puppet explain the steps to complete, what to do when finished, tell how much time is allocated to the task…

9.     Practice Social-Emotional Skills. Role-play situations or have students’ puppets take turns conversing.

A little imagination and playfulness (both yours and your students’) can bring anything to life in the service of learning.  Jim Henson would be proud!