Puppets for the Music Room

Are you a music educator who loves to use puppets? Or are you wondering how you might use puppets to enhance student learning and engage your Preschoolers, Kindergarteners, First Graders, or Second Graders? In this blog post, I am detailing five of my favorite puppets for the music room!

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#1: Dinosaur in Egg

If you are looking for a fun way to practice inner hearing, you should try this dinosaur in an egg puppet. When you want students to sing like normal, the dinosaur pops out of the egg (and you can move his mouth to the rhythm of the lyrics!) Then, if you want students to sing inside their heads, you can pull the dinosaur in the egg shell.

Two other puppets that could work for this is the bear in a tree stump puppet, and the rabbit in a hat puppet!

#2: Owl

I love the snowy owl puppet! It's beautiful…and its entire head can spin around! And even better, you can use it for vocal exploration. By having students say “Woooo” like an owl, you can get them up into their head voices. You could also connect the owl to an owl song, such as “My Owlet,” which you can find notation for here.

#3 and #4: Person and Dog

I enjoy using people puppets specifically for call/ response songs. For example, if you were teaching “Doggie Doggie,” you could have a dog puppet sing the dog part, and the person puppet sing the other part. This visual is a nice way for students to understand the function of the song. Here is the notation for “Doggie Doggie”:

For the game, choose one child to be the dog and one to be the person who has stolen the bone. Give the person who is “it” the bone, and have all students put their hands behind their backs. Then all students sing the first phrase. The dog sings “Who stole my bone,” with their eyes closed, and the person with the bone sings “I stole your bone.” Then, the dog opens their eyes and tries to guess who has the bone!

If you were using the dog puppet by itself, you could have students explore their voices, by having them do a puppy whine. Just like with the owl puppet above, this is a nice way to get students into their head voices.

#5: Any puppet!

To help students identify singing voices, you could use any puppet during greetings, and have students only reply to the puppet if the puppet is using their singing voice. For example, I could use this peacock (who I've named “Penny the Peacock.”)

If the peacock speaks, “Hello Chelsea,” then Chelsea shouldn't respond. But if the peacock sings “Hello Chelsea,” then Chelsea could sing “Hello Penny.” This is a great way to work on solo singing and matching pitch, as well as to get students identifying singing voices!