One of the first more elaborate projects I remember doing with my daughter was making a puppet theater. We took a cardboard box (our favorite toy around here) and painted it and made curtains from scraps of cloth. She had a blast using her finger puppets for the show, and later setting up toy figures. However, the box got old and tattered and we got rid of it.
She asked to make another puppet theater. We picked out another cardboard box from our basement, and I cut out rectangles from both sides. I was going to have the kids paint it, but then I remembered I had fancy sparkly glitter duct tape! We added that to the front and added black duct tape around the sides to help reinforce the box and made it sturdy.
My daughter really wanted to make stick puppets for the puppet theater. She made a lion and a lion tamer, an elephant on a tightrope, and a clown (she was going for a circus theme). My son made a ghost.
Then she made a drawing for background scenery for this circus. However, this caused a little controversy for our puppet theater play. My son did NOT like the background display - before he could just put his hand up with the stick figure and move it around. Now that there was the paper in the way, he was upset. It did make it harder to use the puppet theater as it was designed - they didn’t want to be constantly moving the scenery.
So we tried to use some flexible thinking to solve the problem. My daughter asked me to cut a hole in the top so they could still stick the puppets inside but without having to move around the background around. That solved the problem, until they were too close to each other and had a hard time sharing the space.
The Social Skills Connection
Just through this playtime, we worked on flexible thinking, problem solving, creativity, working together and learning to compromise. Play is an amazing way to learn!
