Monday 9 April 2012

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DIY Floor or Table-Top Children's Puppet Theatre with Cardboard

14 April 2012 - Completed with curtains sewn by my sweet mother-in-law. We used golden as the colour for the frame and
red for the curtains to mirror real-life theatre above


9 April 2012 - Work in progress still missing painting and the curtains... but Joshua started playing with it happily...

Age: From 2 years old

Puppet Theatre

I have been wanting to make a puppet theatre for a long time, but did not find the time for it. It was not an option to buy it, because those from Amazon are small, chunky and unfunctional, and horrendously expensive. Then I forgot all about it. This Easter holidays, I wanted to tell the story of Good Friday and Easter and Joshua wanted to use the puppets. But I hadn't the appropriate puppets, nor the puppet theatre at hand! Neverthesless, God did his sovereign work and just over 3 year old Joshua accepted Christ into his life. Yes, truely it was with God's amazing grace. You can read the post here. For the rest of the Easter holidays, I was working on making the puppet theatre. I made two  - one for Joshua and the other for the church nursery, as I think puppet theatre is a wonderful way to tell Bible stories during Sunday School and Church nursery.

The basic puppet theatre is completed, and Joshua started playing with it. Here he is performing a magic show of disappearing cakes with his teddy bears. But I intend to sew a red curtain for it using some old pieces of red silk cloth from my Cheonsam. I will post a picture, when the curtain is completed. It can also be decorated.

Updates 15.4.2012

My mother-in-law was very kind to help me to sew the curtains, and Florian helped me to paint it. We chose gold as the colour for the frame and red for the curtains to mirror real life theatre. Maybe we might draw some decorative roman colummns on it, but for now it is completed :-)

Dimensions of frame:
Inner dimension: 90 x 60cm
Outer dimenion: 120 x 100cm

How?
1. This cardboard puppet thatre is very simple. It consists of 4 pieces of cardboard folded as follows:


2. After folding, just tape it down the top and bottom fold behind to make it stay in place:


3. The fold serve as the support to make it stand nicely without topping over.

4. Attach curtains with strings behind (optional) and you are ready to go :-)
You can also make a cloth one here. The advantage is that it is easy to store them. The disadvantage is that you need a door to hold it together.

Time:
The actual time is 1 hour, but the actual thinking process took me longer, total 2 hours. However, the trip to source for unwanted cardboard from IKEA packaging took time.

Puppets:

If you have the time, you can make your own puppets. Since I do not have the time, I have found some Biblical character glove puppets from Amazon for children 3 - 7 years old, and will be checking them out:


Bible Story Figurines

If you could not afford to buy real puppets above, don't be too disappointed. I have found a good website showing a cheap and great way to make Bible story figurines. You can simply print them and stick them to ice-cream sticks. Check it out here:

http://www.biblestoryprintables.com/TutorialBibleFigures.html
http://www.biblestoryprintables.com/BibleStoryFigures2.html

Activity:

For ideas on how to carry out an activity with puppet theatre, see my previous post here.

I found some fantastic puppet scripts here:

References:

If you prefer to buy a puppet theatre instead of making your own, there is a similar one from Melissa and Doug from Amazon:


References:

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