We’re making sock puppets! Puppets are a great way to communicate with little ones – they often can get a message across to kids much more effectively than us grown ups. And they are super cute! We made a bunch of fun sock puppets to play with and we’ll take you through the steps of how to make our dragon puppet and then you can make your own puppet too!
Things You’ll Need
The following steps are to make our friendly dragon puppet, but you can use what you learn here to make a fun puppet design of your very own!
- A sock – we used a colorful sock made from chenille.
- Cardboard – the cardboard from cereal or cracker boxes is great.
- Hot glue gun & glue
- Googly eyes
- Felt – a few different colors used for the mouth, teeth, and spine.
- Pom poms – used for eyes and nostrils.
- Marker
- Tissue – used as stuffing for the nose.
- Paper cup – this is to display your beautiful puppet once you’re done!
Other optional materials you can use to make your own puppet character might include:
- Buttons
- Pipe cleaners
- Construction paper
- Foam sheets
- Feathers
- Fun fur
Steps
Let’s make the mouth of our puppet! Cut out a piece of cardboard that fits just inside the width of your sock, then fold it in half like your closing it’s mouth.
Draw what kind of mouth shape you’d like! It can be short or long, round or pointy, you can even make your puppet have an overbite or underbite! Once you’ve decided on your mouth shape, cut it out from your piece of cardboard.
Using a hot glue gun, glue your cardboard mouth piece to a piece of felt. We used red felt for the inside of the dragon’s mouth.
Cut around the cardboard mouth piece leaving about a ¼” border. Snip little lines into the felt along the edge to avoid buckling and glue the border onto the underside of the cardboard mouth.
To make the dragon’s teeth cut a length of white felt long enough to wrap around the top part of the mouth piece and wide enough for the teeth. Remember to keep an edge that you can use to glue it onto the mouth! Next, cut away a row of small triangle teeth.
Glue your teeth to the underside of the cardboard mouth piece.
Now the mouth is ready to be glued onto the sock!
Cut out and glue in other details for your puppet’s mouth, like a tongue!
For our dragon’s eyes, we hot glued googly eyes onto big pom poms, then glued them onto the puppet’s head.
We also used pom poms for nostrils! We stuffed some tissue into the tip of the sock to make an extra thick snout for our dragon as well.
To finish off our dragon, we cut out a pointy spine from purple felt and hot glued it onto the back of our sock.
When you aren’t using your sock puppet a paper cup makes a great place to store it until you’re ready to play!
There are lots of creative sock puppets you can make! Like a silly bumblebee!
For the bumblebee we used googly eyes and buttons for the eyes, and pipe cleaners and pom poms for the antenna. Maybe you’d like a fancy doggy puppet friend!
We gave this dog puppet a bow tie by squeezing a piece of red felt into a bow shape! Bow wow!
You can experiment with different colors, too! Like this green dragon!
There are so many great ways to play with sock puppets and use them as learning opportunities. Here are some ideas you can try with your new puppet friends:
- Use your puppet to tell a story. A puppet can bring an engaging element to storytime or when you’re singing a song. It can also make a familiar book or song fresh and fun again, too!
- Puppets are wonderful communication tools for little ones. If your little one isn’t receptive to what you are saying, let the sock puppet do the talking for you! Puppets can help your little one feel better about leaving the park, getting ready to bed, or eating their vegetables!
- Puppets are also great tools for modeling good behaviour! A child may be eager to copy their puppet friend who says “please” and “thank you”, and cleans up after playing.
- Use your puppet to spark conversations that encourage your child to speak and try out new vocabulary!
- Puppet can be wonderful at expressing emotions and helping little ones learn empathy.
Puppets are also just super fun for kids to play with! Little ones will love to act out their favorite songs with their sock puppet friend and bring them along on new adventures!
These sock friends are a lot of fun to make, but even more fun and learning can begin once they are complete. We hope you try making a sock puppet of your own! We’d love to see your puppet creation!
