Paper Bag Bat Puppet Craft
Craft this spooky yet adorable Paper Bag Bat Puppet using the free template. When you’re done, check out this cat paper bag puppet. This post contains affiliate links.
Time for some more puppet play! Homemade puppets encompass everything we love about crafting with kids: Exercising fine motor skills and following directions, leaving room for creative personal touches, and then using the products of their own handiwork to engage in unlimited activity.
Puppet play in particular is a developmental goldmine, as children can enact both realistic or imaginative scenarios to practice social skills and role playing.
Here’s an all-new character to add to your handmade puppet collection: The bat! For some reason, bats have a spooky, scary reputation.
Maybe it’s because they come out just as it’s getting dark outside, which could understandably make you a little nervous. But in real life, bats don’t generally harm people, and there are so many cool things about them, too!
For starters, they are the only mammal that can fly. How wild is that?! To find their way around, they use echolocation – releasing sounds and detecting their echoes in order to navigate in the dark.
We humans need sophisticated machinery to attempt that! And bats are super helpful in keeping pest populations under control, because their diets consist of bugs such as mosquitoes.
So, you are more than welcome to make your bat puppet scary if you want. But you can also use this project as an opportunity to get to know and befriend another one of our little animal helpers!
This project is well suited for crafters of any age, though you might need to help the youngest ones with some of the tracing and cutting.
You can use any type of paper – construction paper, cardstock, or copy paper, for example. And if you don’t have colored paper or are missing some of the colors you’d like to use, you can simply print the template on white paper and have the child color it with their choice of markers or crayons.
What you need
- Colored paper
- Paper bag
- Scissors
- Glue
- Pencil
- Markers
- Template – download for free at the end of this post
How to Make a Paper Bag Bat Puppet
1. Print the template and cut out all the pieces. Trace them onto the colored papers of your choice, and cut them out. When done, you should have a head, body, wings, fangs, eyes, inner and outer ears, feet, and cheeks.
2. Glue the inner ear parts to the larger/outer ear pieces.
Use a marker to draw details on the wing cutouts. We did this by outlining the shape of the wing, and then drawing lines from the top corner to each of the bumps on the bottom.
3. Glue the feet to the bottom of the body shape (the large rectangular cutout)
4. Glue the wings to each side of the body.
5. Use markers to draw pupils on the eye cutouts. Glue them onto the head.
6. Glue the ears to the top of the head on each side.
7. Use a marker to draw a mouth in the middle of the face under the eyes. Glue the fangs to the mouth. Glue the cheek blushes to the sides of the face. Trim off extra cheek paper that sticks out, if needed.
8. Get your bag ready to assemble the puppet. Put it in front of you so the bottom of the bag is at the top of your puppet, flattened so that you can see the base of the bag. The opening should be facing toward you and will be the bottom of the puppet.
9. Glue the head to the flat bottom side of the paper bag (which is now at the top of the puppet). The ears will stick up past the edge of the bag.
10. Glue the body to the flat side of the paper bag that is below the head.
11. If the open end of the paper bag is sticking out too far from the bottom of the puppet, you can trim it shorter.
That’s it! Your bat is ready to soar through the night on a fun adventure!
Download the Paper Bag Bat Puppet
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