Puppet Parade - Sock Puppets

Local Artist Darrin Crow

Darrin Crow tells imaginative, engaging stories that keep audiences on the edge of their seats and stick with them long after the tale ends.  He introduces students to the power of storytelling at the Arts Academy with classes in storytelling, puppetry, and improvisation. Catch up with Darrin on his website or YouTube Channel.

Sock Puppets - Class 4 of 4

In this Puppet Parade class series you will  learn to make puppets out of everyday items. For our final puppet project we will look to our sock drawers for inspiration as we create sock puppets.  Your audience has heard plenty of jokes by now, so we will branch out and tell a short story.  

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Materials:

• A sock - any color
• Crayons or markers
• Tape
• Glue
• Scissors
• Other things to decorate with
  • Construction paper
  • Felt
  • Feathers
  • Stickers
  • Ribbon
  • Yarn
  • Tinsel
  • Almost anything!

 

Directions:

Making a sock puppet allows all kinds of creativity.

1. Put your hand inside the sock, all the way to the toe.
2. Your fingers are the upper part of the puppet’s mouth.
3. Your thumb is the lower part.
4. Use that mouth outline to draw in your puppet’s mouth.
5. You can color the mouth with a marker or use colored paper glued in place.
6. You can give the puppet eyes with a marker, with colored paper, pompoms, buttons, bottle caps, and all kinds of things.
7. You can add hair, teeth, arms, clothes, and all kinds of great details to your puppet with things from around the house and out of the recycling bin.
8. Take pictures and video of your sock puppet and send them in!

 

Telling Your Tale

Throughout this series we have practiced making up voices for our characters, learned to coordinate the mouth movements of our puppet with the words we are saying, and experimented with movements our hands can make to bring our puppets to life.  Think about all of these things as you tell your final tale.  

Darrin told the Wide Mouth Frog tale which you may be familiar with.  There are other short tales you can tell, maybe a tale from your favorite bedtime story, or you can make one up! Here is a version of The Wide Mouth Frog if you want to tell that tale. As always, remember to begin with the Storyteller’s Pledge!

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Additional Puppet Parade activities can be found here:

• Envelope Puppets
• Paper Bag Puppets
• Stick Puppets

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