Puppets can be a useful tool in your homeschool literacy program. Here are a few ways to use them with children.

• Your beginning reader can read books to a puppet. Young children love the fantasy of interacting with inanimate objects. Sometimes the presence of the puppet helps a child who is struggling with reading to relax and enjoy the experience. The puppet makes reading fun.
• Your children can retell books by writing a script and using puppets. This is a fun way to encourage your children to reread a book and understand it well enough to capture the essence of the story. It also encourages your children to write a good script. Younger children will love to watch the puppet shows, too.
• You can make a read aloud more engaging with a puppet. My kids love listening to the puppet read stories, ask questions, and explain parts of the stories. They talk to the puppet. They also like touching it and even mimicking the way that I use the puppet. This tool can be especially helpful in engaging children who find it difficult to sit still long enough to listen to an entire book.
• Your children can teach the puppet. Have your child summarize a new skill or concept that you’ve been practicing. For example, the puppet can learn to sound out words or find rhyming pairs. The puppet can even find sight words in a story such as “the”, “what”, and “said.”
• You can research another culture with puppets. Shadow puppets are part of Indonesian culture. Your children can create a shadow puppet show as a culminating activity after researching Indonesian culture.

Have fun with puppets!

Photo courtesy of nickstone333