Paper Bag Puppets: An Eco-Friendly Kids' Craft

Children enjoy arts and crafts more than most other educational exercises, and crafts give children the opportunity to express themselves creatively. Considering this, it's clear that there is no better way to teach children about the environment than to allow them to participate in creating green crafts of their own. Paper bag puppets are one easy and fun way to engage your child in earth-friendly play.

If you use paper bags in your house for carrying school lunches or groceries, encourage your child to keep them neat and un-crinkled so that they can later be used in arts and crafts projects. You can then help your child to use them for making puppets. It's an earth-friendly and delightful way to foster your child's growing imagination.

To make a paper bag puppet:

1. Collect earth-friendly decoration supplies: re-used plastic googly-eyes, nontoxic markers or crayons, scrap cardboard, and used paper. Dig through your recycling bin with your child, and ask him to help you select items that might be fun to use in your craft project. With so many free, earth-friendly decorations around the house, there is no need to buy anything new for making paper-bag puppets.

3. Neatly and carefully turn the bag upside down and flattened, as it would be in a package. The bottom of the paper bag will be the puppet's "head". Paste or tape the puppets' features accordingly-- cardboard "ears", bottle-cap "eyes", and so on. Encourage your child to make as many as he wants, and don't be shy about giving suggestions!

3. Help your child to draw sketches or write stories about the puppets, to decide who or what the paper bags will represent. One puppet might be Jimmy the Earth-Saving Dog, while another might be an Alien from the Planet Goorg. Encourage your child's creativity!

4. When the puppets have all been given their own personalities, you and your child can write a script for a performance with the puppets, and make it an after-dinner living-room show. You will both enjoy seeing the paper bag puppets come to life as manifestations of your child's creativity.

There are many other ways to use paper bags in earth-friendly crafts for children. Try decorating them with crayons or markers and using them repeatedly to carry lunch or groceries. When they've been worn-out beyond the point of continued use, the scrap paper can be used for other arts and crafts projects: coloring, paper dolls, or even accessories for new paper bag puppets!