Make your own Puppet Theatre
An excellent way of communicating with children (and even adults) is with puppets. If you’ve seen puppetry at work, you’ll know what I mean – kids glued to what’s going on! Kids hanging off every word! Kids laughing at the lamest jokes! Yes, puppetry is a great ministry tool – though it’s not without its limitations.
How can you get your church’s children’s ministry started in puppetry? Puppets, for a start. And training on how to use them and write scripts. But something that you’ll use time and time again is a well-constructed puppet theatre…
A year or two ago, during the summer holidays, we had a sort of summer project at our church. This ran for several days – and people on holidays came along and lent a hand in designing and constructing a puppet theatre for our church. And over the course of three weekdays we designed the thing, bought materials, and made the thing into wonderful reality.
Here is a link to a PDF file I put together a while ago. It’s the plans for the puppet theatre at our church, with detailed information on parts, equipment, and a step-by-step construction guide (7 pages long).
Puppet theatre plans (download page)
There are other plans around as well on the Internet – quite a few are commercial, and you’ll need to pay for the plans. There are also a number of free plans available, but they may take some finding.
Hi there Andrew, I guess I can\’t download the pdf file from my computer. Is it possible to email the plans along with the list of puppets you\’ve used for your church? My email is amyst.pierre@yahoo.ca
i\’m making my first one in march at a workshop… very excited. i\’m a girl and not sure whether to make a boy or girl puppet… will boys still be hooked on the chicks?
I realised that the link hasn’t been working – I have now fixed it (27 Oct 2010).
The link will now take you to my public folder on skydrive where you can download the PDF file.
Thanks for your interest!