Telling Stories Through Puppets

Puppets are a great tool for allowing children to express themselves effectively. Communicating through storytelling puppet-style, can be rewarding for all involved. It provides a safe and fun space to listen to and interact with your child.

Children often use a mixture of fantasy and their own experiences when making a puppet story. They like to include things that may hurt, worry or frighten them by projecting them onto the puppet. It is also a lovely time to celebrate the special moments and more positive aspects of life. When puppet storytelling is supported by you, it removes the pressure of dealing with the world alone and is all part of helping your little one to develop into a responsible and happy young adult. We all find ourselves in situations where we are unsure how to respond and this type of enactment helps to encourage control and/or understanding.

Children love to feel that they are in charge of the play. When interacting in this way, please try and listen to their ideas and allow them to guide you. It can be good for you to step back and hand over the role of director. Child-led storytelling can help with confidence building and give a great sense of satisfaction about the finished result.

Decide on a setting:

Select a place (away from other distractions if possible). Make a performance space - e.g. a blanket or sheet over the back of a couple of chairs or peeking over the back of a sofa. Alternatively, just sit with your children and make the puppeteers part of the performance.

 Decide on a style:

Use the puppets you already have or make your own puppets - e.g. shadow puppetry, marionettes, 'Muppet' style, hand/finger puppets or even simple sock puppets. Next comes the fun part as you create your puppet’s character - e.g. a name, a voice and a style of movement.

Decide on a story:

This is a great time to show your children that you value their ideas. Use a piece of paper to make notes or draw pictures with them. It is easier to put their ideas together this way. Try to create a framework of a beginning, middle and an end. Encourage your children to put a crisis or dilemma in the middle section. 'Goodies' and 'Baddies' help make an exciting story too. A happy ending helps to structure the puppet performance for a younger age group, and so remind the children to add one.

Try and aim for something simple, especially in the beginning. Guidelines and a little structure help to focus all involved on a desired outcome. For example, you may give a limited time to devise the play, or you may give them the title of the play and the length it would have to be. These limitations helped you to get moving quickly and it fires up the children’s imaginations. Share the task of setting these up to remind you all that the children also have ownership over these structures.

A stimulus or situation you can refer to helps to create ideas – e.g. looking at a photograph, reading a book, hearing a news story, coming home from a day trip. Use all types of experiences in your creations. Allow the children to have fun with the story and enjoy the processes you are sharing with them.

Some children may want to enlarge on the task of puppet storytelling by creating a play script, a cartoon/comic strip, or by writing a story. A real sense of performance can be experienced by making rehearsal time, printing tickets, colouring in programmes, designing seating plans and cooking interval snacks. What a truly engaging experience that would be! Obviously the level of graft required is not for everyone. Even a five minute plan, a quick try followed by the pièce de résistance is a truly rewarding way of playing alongside your children.