This is an easy, inexpensive and flexible craft project for children age 3 – 7.

I’ll offer a brief tutorial here at the top. There’s more details in the instruction posters, below.

• Do a drawing – any drawing you choose! It needs to fit inside the snow-cone or toilet paper tube, so it needs to be no larger than 2.25″ tall and 1.75″ wide.
• Tape the drawing to a bamboo skewer or a straw.
• Cut off the tip of a snow-cone cup to make a small hole OR cut slits in one end of the TP tube and fold it inwards, leaving a hole big enough for the straw or skewer.
• Insert the skewer into the cup / tube, threading the skewer through the hole.
• Push the skewer up so the monster is poking up out of the cup, then wrap some tape around the skewer. That helps prevent the cup from slipping off the skewer.
• Pull the monster down to hide or push it up to play peekaboo!

The Design Process / Alternatives to Consider

In our preschool/kindergarten STEM class, our plan was to study forces – pushes and pulls. I searched for inspiration for a take-home craft project. I got inspiration from Hello, wonderful; pebblesandpiggytails; In the Playroom; Kids’ Craft Room. You could make people or teddy bears or something related to a holiday if you prefer that to monsters.

You can make the craft with a snow cone cup or TP tube, as the directions show, or a paper cup with a hole punched in the bottom. We prefer the TP tube, as they are sturdy enough for the kids to hold tightly as they peekaboo the puppet. The snow cones collapse if squeezed.

For the stick, you could use a dowel, pencil, skewer, straw…

What to use for the puppet? Some use Styrofoam balls for a head but we try not to use Styrofoam. You could use a pompom head, or craft foam or other items. We decided to make the puppets with card stock. For children over age 5 or 6, you could give them cardstock rectangles to do their own design on. For younger kids, use templates. I just searched for “silly monsters coloring pages” and came up with several examples, and pasted these into a document, and added circles around each one, because it’s easier for our kids to cut out the circles than try to cut out monster shapes. (Here’s my sample, but I don’t have copyright to these images, so I encourage you to create your own.) The snow cones are 2.75″ across at the top, but they narrow quickly so my designs needed to be less than 1.75″ wide and less than 2.25″ tall to slide in and out easily, and to be fully concealed when pulled down.

This is a super easy craft that could be adapted to almost any holiday or theme. Try it out!