A few years back, I was sharing this activity about making Easter puppets by cutting pictures out of a book when I realised the book I was recommending wasn’t easy to get hold of any more. Instead of ditching the idea, I thought: Why not create a set of puppets? So here they are! A set of 16 puppets which are easy to make and fun to use, available as a book made of high quality card for you to cut your puppets from or a download for you to print onto your own card.
The set has 16 puppets, but you could do the story with as few as 4 or 5 if you wanted.
Children old enough will enjoy cutting out and sticking onto either the strips of card included, lolly sticks or paper straws.
Some of the puppets will work well glued back to back and swivelled around to show the change in the picture (e.g. the tomb closed and open)
Following a suggestion from a parent during the (very fast) product development stage, there is a simple version of the Easter story in the form of an Easter storyboard, including pictures of which puppets you could use at each stage in the story and Bible references so that you can look up the story in the Bible.
There are a variety of ideas for using the puppets, including listening to the Bible story on biblegateway.com (you’ll find links here) and ideas for sharing the story with others.
Although I’ve designed this for busy families to have fun doing this at home together, it could obviously be used by group leaders to tell the Easter story either face-to-face or online. A great way to engage the children in this would be to provide each of them with their own set of puppets. They could then ‘act’ out the parts during your telling of the story, and also re-tell it in their own words and afterwards in their own time.
I wanted to make the puppets available to as many families as possible, which is why you can get them as a download pdf or in a card book.
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