Today, I got crafty for Veronika! Travis and I wanted to make her a set of animal finger puppets, which I copied from a template. Technically, the felt pieces are meant to be sewn together. But I will be honest: I cannot sew to save my life. What I can do is hot glue, and that worked in a pinch!

First, draw a template for the bodies of the animals on white paper. Pin the paper to a piece of felt, and cut out. You’ll need two for each animal, front and back. I used white felt for a zebra, green for a crocodile, yellow for a lion, and light blue for a hippo.

Hot glue (or sew) the two pieces together.

Next I added tiny bits of felt for each animal’s features. The zebra got black triangles for stripes, a black nose, and pink ears.

The hippo had a piece going horizontally across for his nose in the same light blue, as well as pink ears and eyes. The lion got a brown mane, and a yellow circle glued over that for the face. The crocodile got big white eyes and itsy-bitsy white triangles for teeth.

Add any final features with a pen or sharpie.

These came out so cute! You can hold them up for your little one to see. Veronika might have been slightly alarmed at first.

I named each animal for her, and made their sounds, and had them act out silly hand plays.

Big sibs will definitely want to take a turn with the puppets on!

Finally, we used the animals at story time. If you have books featuring any of the animals you’ve made, trot out the puppet to help bring the story alive. Or choose which animal to make based on what books you have at home!

We’ll be playing with these for a long time to come, I can already tell.