Time for a Three-Minute Puppet Stage
Most people probably think puppets are for kids, but I don’t expect ever to get tired of them. We actually had two homeschooling experiences with puppets and both times they involved elderly people.
When Mary Evelyn and a homeschooled friend were about 12-13, they decided to volunteer at a nursing home. When we asked the activity director for ideas of what they might do, she suggested that they take puppets along with them and visit residents.
When we were still living in Illinois, John, Bethany, and Mary Evelyn prepared a puppet show based on Ecclesiastes 3, which begins:
There is an appointed time for everything.
And there is a time for every event under heaven—
A time to give birth and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.
A time to kill and a time to heal;
A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to weep and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn and a time to dance.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-4
Our children performed their show at a meeting of the Golden Agers — the senior citizens group at our church.
Now it’s Ray’s and my turn to do puppet shows. Our broad audience spans grandchildren, the youngest of whom are a few months old, to my Mother, who is 83. Our first Notty and Little puppet show was such a hit at Thanksgiving, . . .
. . .  that Ray and I had another go at it when we had our family Christmas gathering yesterday. Everyone enjoyed it again. I was particularly pleased with Mother’s enthusiastic applause.
Believe me, we are as homey-bomey as they come when it comes to our puppet performances. This is all about entertaining the grandchildren and letting them see Notty and Little have fun. Our set-up is so simple that I decided to share it, in case you’d like to give your children an opportunity to have fun with puppet shows.
Here’s how we built our puppet stage:
- Hammer two small nails into the sides of the door frame, so the nail holes won’t show later.
- Measure the distance between the nails.
- Attach 2 large safety pins that same distance apart along one edge of a tablecloth (or small quilt or blanket).
- Slip one safety pin over each nail.
Voila! A puppet stage. We left the nails in the door frame after Thanksgiving. That makes set-up even quicker than three minutes.
Ray and I use Little Golden Books as our scripts. Our cast of characters for the book Jingle Bells was so large last night that we had to have a few stuffed animals stand in as puppets. We also needed a horse to pull our “one-horse open sleigh,” so we used a stick horse (well, actually ours is a stick mule because Ray is from Columbia, Tennessee, which has given itself the title, “Mule Capital of the World,” but that’s another story).
One of the sweetest things about last night was four generations being silly together. After all:
There is an appointed time for everything.
And there is a time for every event under heaven.
Ecclesiastes 3:1
Sounds like fun. We’ve always had a pretty healthy supply of puppets around, but the kids mostly just played with them. I wonder what they would think now, hmm….
I was surprised when the nursing home activity director suggested that idea to Mary Evelyn and her friend. I just watched A Muppet Christmas Carol the other night while I was getting gifts ready to wrap. It is a powerful show. There was one very immodest costume on a real person, but I was very impressed with the powerful positive message of faith and redemption that came through even though puppets were telling Dickens’ marvelous story.