Make your own peg puppets and engage in imaginative role-plays.
What you’ll need: Clothes pegs, coloured paper, coloured markers, scissors, glue, double sided tape or blue-tac. It’s quite fun to play with another person or even as a whole family!
What’s it for?
This activity will allow you to feel more secure and comfortable to express your thoughts and feelings using puppets. You could role-play with puppets to look at difficult situations from different perspectives. For example, role-play could help you understand a disagreement that needs to be resolved. This is a great activity that will help you learn about empathy and build even stronger relationships.
Check In:
Notice how you’re feeling right now. Close your eyes and notice what’s going on inside your mind and body.
How are you feeling?
What are you thinking?
How does your body feel?
Method:
Think about a puppet you are about to create. What kind of puppet is it going to be? Think about its character, facial expression, and size. What colour is it?
If you work with another person. You could think about a story you would like to create together and agree on the characters before attempting this activity.
Choose coloured paper that best reflects the puppet you have just imagined.
Place your peg on the paper ad draw a line that is the same length as the part of the peg that opens. Imagine that this line will be your puppet’s mouth.
Now draw your puppet around the line. Draw the nose, eyes, ears and head above the line and below it, draw the puppet’s chin.
Cut your puppet out and then cut along the line to create two pieces of your puppet.
You could draw an upper lip on the top part of your puppet and a lower lip on the bottom part of your puppet.
You could also cut out some teeth by measuring the same length as your line and gluing it to the back of the face.
You can personalise your puppet by adding any elements onto your puppet’s face. You can simply draw it or stick any decorative objects you can find at home, using glue, blue-tac, or double-sided tape.
Now stick some double-sided tape or blue-tac on both sides of the opening of the peg and stick both parts of your puppet down.
Now try to open and close the peg to open and close your puppet’s mouth and you are ready for peg puppet role-play.
You can create imaginative stories or use role-play to think about different ways of looking at difficult situations, such as disagreements with your friends.
Extra Activity: You can make as many peg puppets as you like to create your own puppet show. You could perform it to your family or ask an adult to help you record the show and share with your friends or family by sending them a video or some pictures.
When you’ve finished, spend a moment reflecting on the activity and ask yourself the following questions:
What was your favourite puppet that you created today and why?
Did you prefer playing on your own or with another person?
If you played with another person, was it hard or easy to engage in a role-play?
What was your role-play or performance all about?
Did you learn anything new while you did this activity?
Conclusion:
This activity helps you to develop your creativity and imagination. It also helps to foster stronger relationships, a sense of teamwork and acceptance of different perspectives and ways to resolve conflicts.
Take a moment to notice how you are feeling at the end of this activity. Did you discover anything surprising? What can you take away to make you feel better about yourself from this activity?
If you would like to, share something about your experience with this activity with someone you live with! Ask the person who looks after you to send us an email if you have any questions or comments about the activity or would like to send us any pictures (info@catcorner.co.uk). Don't forget to subscribe for more fun CAT activities!
Created by Karolina Koman © May 2020
Creative Arts Used: Art
Psychological Areas Explored: Resilience, Relationships, Self-Exploration
If you enjoyed this activity, you might also like:Puppet Performance: Write a play using toys you have and characters you create.
These activities could be done by children of all ages, but some may need the support of their parent or carer to read the instructions or complete the activity safely.
This website was made by CAT Corner to help you explore your feelings through fun creative arts activities. The people using the website and the people responsible for them need to make sure they stay safe (full disclaimer on About page).
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