Make interactive animal fingerpuppets with cotton gloves!
You’ll need:
• Cotton gloves
• Glue (hot glue or school-grade)
Optional:
• R5601 Plastic Lacing Needles
• String
Pick out five squares of the Fabric Mosaics. Wrap each square around a glove finger. Push the squares down towards the palm area. Use hot glue or school-grade glue to paste the Fabric Mosaic squares onto the fingers. Wait for the glue to dry. Finally, glue or sew an animal button onto each fingertip.
For a quick craft, you can make and paste the faces from our 10 Commandments Cards (R22511) characters onto the glove fingertips for Sunday School! Or—if you’re planning to use the finger puppets as a literacy/numeracy puppet—glue or sew on some number or letter buttons (R2185 Math Beads and R2184 Manuscript Letter Beads).
Any dollar store or department store will usually have a pack of cotton gloves on sale, so if you’re planning to use this as a craft for the whole class, grab a pack and distribute to each child.
With R2184 Manuscript Letter Beads, the kids can spell out their names on the glove fingers! For children with longer names, use nicknames or a shortened version of their names to fit on the five fingers. Alternatively, give children two gloves to wear on both hands. With two gloves, children can spell out their first and last names.
Play a fun fingerpuppet game along to the tune of “B-I-N-G-O.” Paste the name Bingo across the fingers. Note: For the teacher’s pair, remember to switch the side you paste the letters onto so that the letters are facing out towards your class. Wear the glove while singing the popular preschool song. Ask your students to pay attention to your gloved hand and to try and mimic the movements with their own gloved hands. Start out slowly. Ball up your fist, then as you’re singing B-I-N-G-O, lift each corresponding finger up in the air.
Counting numbers on little fingers is a great way to start off math comprehension. Paste numbers 1-5 on your right hand starting from your pinky as number 1 and your thumb as number 5. Use R2185 Math Beads for this craft! Grab a left-hand glove and continue to paste on the numbers 6-10, with 6 starting on your left thumb and continuing through to number 10 on your left pinky. The order that you paste the numbers may seem a little bizarre at first, but as your counting the numbers out, you’ll most likely be holding your hands out towards the class. They’ll be reading the numbers from left to right, which helps strengthen left-to-right letter sequencing.
This is a great activity for exercising those little fingers!
