You don’t have to wait until Groundhog’s Day to make this puppet – he (or she) is a great craft to make any time of year. You can even easily modify it to be any other animal.  Other than a small paper bag you probably have everything else you need to make this craft in your home right now.

Call the kids to the table and gather together a variety of brown items. You can use scraps of yarn, ribbon, felt, chenille stems, and anything else from your craft cupboard.  You can also dig around your kitchen cupboards and use anything brown you can find.

Supplies Needed to Make this Groundhog Puppet:

• Small Paper Lunch Bag
• Google Eyes
• Scrap of White Felt
• Brown Felt, Craft Foam, or Paper (for ears)
• Scraps of Brown Items
• Craft Glue or a Glue Pen

Tools Needed:

• Scissors

Leave the paper lunch bag flat and lay it on your work surface. You will want it so the bottom of the bag is facing up. The bottom of the bag will actually be the groundhog’s head.

Cut two ear shapes and glue them behind the head. Cut two small rectangles out of white felt and glue them under the flap made by the folded bag bottom.  Glue on two, large google eyes. I made this puppet with my grandson, who isn’t quite 2 so I cut out the ears and teeth and glued them in place.  I then put two dabs of glue where the eyes would go and then let him put the eyes in place.

Dig through your craft cupboard, your kitchen cupboards and drawers, and anywhere else you think you might find some fun brown items you can use to add texture to the groundhog puppet. Cut (or tear if possible) the items you find into pieces that are around 1- to 2-inches long.

Once you have all of your texture pieces cut, dot several spots of glue all over the paper bag.  Start randomly placing the texture pieces on the glue dots.

Have fun sticking the cut items to the bag so it looks like shaggy hair. My grandson had lots of fun doing this, although I had to keep a wash rag nearby because he didn’t like getting glue on his fingers.

Keep adding glue dots and texture items to your puppet until you get the desired look.  BY the time we got near the end of this project, my grandson was not only placing the cut items onto the glue that I dotted on the bag, he was making his own glue dots using Elmer’s Early Learners glue pens!