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Make a Shadow Puppet Play!

Natural Kids: Make a Shadow Puppet Play!

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Make a Shadow Puppet Play!


When my older children were young, we had a beautiful little wooden and vellum shadow puppet theater from Hearthsong Catalog. Here is how to make one of your own, and a cast of puppets.

I started by making the shadow puppets with the help of a wonderful book by Laura Ross, called Hand Puppets: How to Make and Use Them". Using her drawings as a guide, I drew the characters from "Peter and the Wolf" onto some poster board. Black poster board would be best, but I only had red. You could also use cereal box scraps, or even thick construction paper. If you are worried about your drawing skills, try not to let that stop you. Young children tend to admire their parent's drawings very much. You could also trace characters in a book, or create imaginary creatures.



Once I had cut out all the characters, I mounted them on long kabob skewers, using paper hinges, like so:



For the theater, you could stretch a white sheet across a doorway, glue vellum to a wooden canvas stretcher, or like me, tape one-ply white paper to an old metal frame from the attic. My son helped and directed the creation of the scenery. Our first stage was small and today we enlarged it so that the puppets had more space to move about. Unfortunately, the paper seam showed. I would try to use one large sheet of paper next time.



We put the theater up on some chairs and covered the bottom of the chairs with a blanket, to hide the puppeteers. You can see a little bit of our scenery through the paper.



We clamped a strong light behind the stage, to shine on the back of theater over the left shoulder of the puppeteer. If it is angled correctly, your own shadow should be out of the way.


By now it was dark and we turned off all the lights except the spot and began acting out "Peter and the Wolf" by Prokofiev, narrated by Carol Channing on audiotape. My son wanted to be the primary puppeteer, and I was his assistant until there got to be too many characters on the stage for him to handle alone.


It is hard to manage several puppets at a time. A piece of styrofoam below the stage is handy for sticking puppet skewers into, as you can see below.



Now, for a view of what the audience sees! Here is the bird, the duck, and Peter himself.


Here are some friends trying out the puppets after they saw the puppet show, using the characters in their own ways.



Oh, dear.....



As I hoped, my little boy got an idea for his own shadow puppet play after we did "Peter and the Wolf", and that's what we're going to work on next!

If you like this posting, come visit my blog at www.acornpies.blogspot.com

9 Comments:

Blogger Dayanara said...

How fun! My brother and I used to do that when we were little. Not as fancy but very fun and grest way to keep kids away from the TV.-D.
www.pinponbydayanara.com

February 24, 2010 at 8:31 AM  
Blogger Doda said...

That is gorgeous! I've been meaning to try this out for so long. You've given me some ideas as to how I can do it. Thanks

February 24, 2010 at 8:42 AM  
Blogger myletterstoemily said...

what fun! and so beautiful too!

i used to drool over the hearthsong
catalog.

blessings,
lea

February 24, 2010 at 4:22 PM  
Blogger Jen from SewnNatural said...

wonderful, wonderful post Beth!
Thanks!!

February 24, 2010 at 5:05 PM  
Anonymous The Magic Onions said...

Lovely, as always, Beth... thanks for the inspiration!
Blessings and magic,
Donni

February 24, 2010 at 7:24 PM  
Anonymous chimera said...

What a wonderful post! I bet even my teenagers would want to try this!

February 25, 2010 at 11:04 PM  
Blogger germandolls said...

that is awesome! thanks for all the great pictures and sharing your idea!

February 26, 2010 at 6:50 AM  
Anonymous Term paper said...

It’s great to see good information being shared and also to see fresh, creative ideas that have never been done before.

March 1, 2010 at 6:10 AM  
Blogger Playing by the book said...

Just linked here from my own Peter and the Wolf post!
http://www.playingbythebook.net/2010/03/18/peter-and-the-wolf/

March 19, 2010 at 3:05 AM  

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