Kids Crafts: Dragon Puppet

The Year of the Ox
is here!

And, to commemorate it, Ana and I made a little craft project over the weekend.

Ana's teacher has been educating her class about festivities and cultures around the world in general. And, apparently, she didn't want to pass up this opportunity of doing something creative to celebrate Chinese New Year. So, kids in her class did various themed activities involving coloring, making paper cut-outs, manipulating little puppets, drawing flags and so on.

One of the teachers apparently found a huge dragon puppet/costume somewhere, a perfectly good one, and she brought it over to her class . It fits about 18-19 kids in the body, with one kid holding up a large, brightly painted traditional-looking head and the other bringing up the tail-end. So, the older kids put on a dragon dance of sorts. Plus, they have been reading Demi's The Boy Who Painted Dragons, and other themed books.

So, thankfully, Ana was primed and charged already. I just casually suggested that we make a small dragon puppet and entertain Oggie and Appa with it. She jumped to it.

Materials used: Card stock paper for head and tail, construction paper for accordion-folded body, two bamboo skewers (or straws or even long Popsicle sticks if preferred), craft glue or cello tape, color markers or paints or crayons or glitter glue to decorate the dragon

Ana decided it had to be a girl dragon and didn't like any of the elongated reptilian head I came up with, so, we went with a jolly-looking round-faced dragon with a weird pout and pointy ears/horns :)

She helped glue the parts and color the dragon with crayons. She let me add the largish eye and some swirls for scales. I did the accordion folding for the body and attached the bamboo skewers while she watched with intense curiosity.

The idea is not original, of course. I was looking around for activities to do with Ana and came upon various versions of this project on the web and decided to give it a try.

Next time, we probably will try to make the dragon fancier - maybe glue glitter and tissue paper to make shiny scales, and probably try a more traditional-looking face...