Muppet Puppets

Who doesn't LOVE The Muppets?  Well, we do!!

My family's all-time favorite Muppet show is the Christmas Carol.  We also have a few seasons of the old  Muppet TV series on DVD.  They're short and silly, and my daughter loves them!  So when the new Muppet Movie came out on DVD, I figured it would make a perfect activity for our family.

{our homemade sock puppet "muppets"}

I thought it would be fun to make our own Muppets and put on our own show.  First I chose a Muppet script for us to perform. I went to this website http://www.puppetresources.com/.  This website has tons of puppet scripts for puppet plays.  I did a search for "Muppet" and found a list of Muppet scripts from the old Muppet TV series.  I chose the Bunny script for our Muppet play.  I printed off a copy of the script for each family member to read from while we performed the play (or practice, if they wanted to).

 Then, together we each made our own sock puppet.  I found this website with a pattern to make the sock puppets www.daniellesplace.com.  We used large socks, felt, yarn, and cardboard to make our sock puppets.  But you could also use brown lunch sacks and draw on the faces to make quick and inexpensive puppets.  We made Nurse Piggy, Doctor Bob, and Nurse Janice (to go along with our Bunny script).

To set the stage, I set up a curtain for us to hide behind.  For simplicity, you could also try sitting behind the couch or kitchen table.  Either way, I recommend trying to hide yourself a little because afterall, the fun of puppets is that you can't see the puppeteer, right?

I also setup our video recorder so that we could watch our performance afterwards. (You can try using a webcam, iPad, camera, etc.) I highly recommend taping your puppet performance.  We didn't have a live audience to perform for so it was hilarious to play back our little muppet play. So fun when the entire family is involved!

Afterwards we popped popcorn, snuggled in, and watched The Muppets movie together as a family.