Sock puppet pet craft kit
Puppets are wonderful in enabling children to be expressive, playful and spontaneous. They can be powerful too in enabling children to share their experiences and explore their feelings from a safe distance so that they can begin to understand and reflect on situations, emotions and their world around them.
Using sock puppets provides opportunities for the children to interact, to talk about fears, anxieties, or hopes and dreams and to share their experiences with the other children and puppets.
Having puppets that represent animals or their pets can give children a real sense of connection and belonging so that they don’t feel alone with big feelings or experiences.
They give children a friend to talk to and an opportunity to feel understood without judgement or fear of rejection. Animals and pets are often who a child may go to for a cuddle or to talk to when they have difficult or uncomfortable feelings that can be hard to manage and so our puppets are easy to relate to and are representative of animals, friendly characters or imaginative pets.
The sock puppet craft kits are intrinsic to the delivery of the Hamish & Milo Wellbeing Intervention.
We use them as an opportunity to introduce an emotional theme, create an atmosphere that is safe and nurturing and allow children to explore sensitive emotional themes in a supported and unintrusive way.
We use them as a ‘distancing technique’, which means children can think and talk through the puppets whilst still experiencing empathy and reflection. They will also have the chance to begin to make sense of their feelings and experiences.
We include sock puppet craft kits within our resource packs so that each child can make and have their own to use in the sessions. They can take the puppets home with them as a ‘special pet’ or ‘friend’ at the end of the group intervention.
The sock-puppet-making activity allows the children to be creative, imaginative and expressive and we encourage the adult to make one too!
What is included in each sock puppet craft kit?
A great Value Craft Kit for making 7 sock puppets
The Hamish & Milo sock puppet craft kits include everything you need – socks, googly eyes, buttons, felt, pom-poms, pipe cleaners, ribbons and fabric glue. We even include a ‘Handmade with Love’ button for each puppet.
We include an instruction and advice card in each session pack to help you with the basics; please allow the children the freedom to create any puppet they like!
We have included sock puppet profile pages in the wellbeing journals so please encourage the children to write a little about their new special friend.
We suggest that the children bring their puppets to each session so they can use them to speak with, or for them and join in with the group’s activities!
