Stick Puppet Show from Postcards and Holiday Cards

Are you wondering what to do with all of those really cute postcards and greeting cards you received for birthdays, holidays, and other events? Then try making these easy stick puppets with your 2 to 6 year old child!

Create the Postcard Puppets

1. Start by sorting through all of the cards and picking out the ones with the best images, or “characters” for your storytelling, really anything that your child finds appealing.
   • From holiday cards: candy canes, snowmen, reindeer, bright stars, etc.
   • From birthday cards: you’ll be sure to have a wide assortment of animals and favorite TV characters.
   • From photo greeting cards: people your child knows are okay as long as you are fine with it.
   • Characters from any cardboard container also work well, like from cereal and fruit snack boxes and underwear packaging, etc.
2. Help your child cut out the image, or simply cut along the perforation of the card so that you are left with the front cover only.
3. With some masking tape or invisible tape, attach a popsicle stick to the bottom of the back of your selected image, leaving about half of it sticking out. That’s it, you now have a stick puppet!
4. Make as many of them as you would like and find a box or plastic container to store them in.

Set up the Puppet Show

• If your sofa is against the wall, please move it forward so that there is enough space for your child to move around behind it.
• The audience will be sitting or standing in front of the sofa.
• Your child can hold the puppets while hiding behind the sofa and “acting” out the story or “narrating” a story of their very own.
• Remember to praise your child and give lots of applause and cheer like a good audience!

How to Help Your Child

This “sofa puppet show” is a great way to encourage language skills as your child will be remembering and saying words from stories, singing or making up songs, and even changing the plot of the stories which is great for their developing imaginations. You can also add real props like toy cars and dolls and another child (fun for siblings) can work those props behind the sofa adding sound effects while your child narrates.

This is meant to be a child-led activity, although if your child gets frustrated or needs help getting started for lack of “words to say” then just ask if you can take a turn behind the sofa.

• You can model for your child a simple story with a beginning (It was a sunny day at the zoo), middle (and the giraffe was talking to his friend the elephant) and ending (but then it started to rain and they ran back to their families).
• You can also model the different kinds of sounds your voice can make, like cars and trains zooming by, animal sounds, strong winds, etc.
• Then let your child have her turn and see if she imitates you. With practice she’ll create her own storylines and characters! You may also hear familiar plots adapted from stories you’ve read to your child or verses from songs they like to sing or dance to.

I played this for the first time after my son’s second birthday. He loved his big, colorful Elmo birthday card SO much. All we did was go behind the sofa and sing the “La la la” Elmo theme song while he made his puppet dance. His pretend play really took off, along with our stick puppet collection of more than 40 cards; he is almost 6 years old and his vocabulary and stories are quite elaborate! As a nice bonus, my son and daughter have embraced the idea of recycling, cardboard in this activity’s example, and independently “save” packaging that has attractive designs before trash and recycle pick-up day at our house.