Little Red Riding Hood Craft
Craft a paper bag puppet Little Red Riding Hood craft to practice your acting skills and learn about personal safety using this free template! When you’re done, check out this cute and easy Fire Fighter Puppet. This post contains affiliate links.
This adorable puppet craft was inspired by a classic, popular fairy tale – though as always, there is no limit to what your imagination can act out with it!
Puppet play is a fantastic way for children of all ages to express themselves and hone their budding acting skills. They can gain even more pride and ownership of this process when using puppets they made by themselves, like this one!
Like most fables, the classic story of Red Riding Hood offers an opportunity to discuss personal safety, and using puppets makes it even more fun and approachable.
Grab another puppet and act it out together with your child to explore the different possible ways the characters could have acted in the story and how that might alter the outcomes.
If you’d like a full set of Little Red Riding Hood puppets with the script, you can find that here. Those are easy color & craft ones that have less assembly.
The instructions below are for a one-sided puppet. For an added benefit of teaching children to recognize and express different feelings, you can print the template twice and draw a different emotion on one of the faces (for example, scared or sad).
Glue one to the front and one to the back of the puppet. While acting out different parts of the story, show the side that better expresses the character’s emotion at that time.
While Red Riding Hood was the inspiration behind this project, you can feel free to substitute any colors you like to make a more general sweet old-timey country girl.
No matter what you decide, with the free template and instructions below you’re sure to end up happily ever after!
Want to complete the story? Simply pick up any grandma and wolf puppet and put on a puppet show!
What you’ll need
- Paper bag (you can try starting with a red one to make things cooler!
- Colored papers (such as construction paper, cardstock, or colored copy paper)
- Markers
- Glue (I recommend tacky)
- Pencil
- Scissors
- Template – available at the end of this post
How to make a Little Red Riding Hood Puppet
1. Choose colored papers for each of the template parts: head and arms, cheeks, hair, cloak and hood, shoes, sleeves, apron, and bow. Cut out the template shapes, trace them onto the colored papers, and carefully cut out the colored shapes.
You can also cut out a simple basket shape from brown, yellow, or tan colored paper.
2. Glue the hair cutout along the top of the head shape. If you’d like, you can glue on some matching yarn to make the hair more 3-D and add texture.
Glue the straight side of the arm shapes to the straight side of the sleeve cutouts, with the sleeve on top.
Glue the small, round piece to the center of the bow.
3. Glue the blushing cheeks near the bottom of each side of the head shape. Trim the edges if needed.
Glue the head near the bottom of the hood, with the pointy side of the hood on top.
4. Glue the bow to the bottom middle of the hood.
Use a marker to draw a face on the head.
5. Choose a colored paper to be the base of Red Riding Hood’s dress. (If you’re making the cape red, choose a different color for the dress.) Measure the paper bag or trace it onto the colored paper, and cut it out.
6. Glue the apron cutout onto the center of that colored paper rectangle.
7. Glue the paper with the apron onto the paper bag. The open side of the bag will be the bottom of the puppet. The flat side of the apron goes on top.
8. Glue the cloak shape to the top of the dress base, overlapping the top of the apron.
9. Glue the shoe shapes to the bottom of the dress, along the open side of the paper bag.
10. The bottom or base of the paper bag is the top of your puppet. Flatten it toward you and glue on the head.
11. Glue an arm to each side of the puppet.
12. If you made a basket, you can glue it to one of the puppet’s hands. Alternatively, if you’d like to have her pick up and put down the basket during your storytelling, you can attach it with fun tak (also known as poster or mounting putty). If you’ve used strong cardstock as your paper, you can also try velcro as a removable/reusable option.
Now go ahead and make some more characters, or use puppets you already have to interact with Red Riding Hood in your own version of the popular fairy tale!
Download the Little Red Riding Hood Craft Template
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