Chinese New Year Dragon Puppet - Low Ink

Download Chinese Dragon Puppet

Not only are we learning about Chinese New Year in our homeschooling adventures, we have done some activities for it in our Girl Scouting adventures as well.  Last week our girls made an awesome Chinese New Year dragon and learned the dragon dance  - it was a HUGE hit.  The only downfall was that everyone did not get to take home their own dragon.  So, this week we made mini Chinese dragon puppets.  I originally found the idea at Crazy Mommy's blog through Pintrest (I could write love poetry for Pintrest!).  I modified the original printable by cleaning up some of the background (it was printing gray so it was using a lot more ink than need be) and making is smaller so that we could make it with ribbon instead of streamers.

The process for making the dragon is pretty simple and they are so neat when finished.

Supplies You Will Need

• dragon template printed onto cardstock
• 1 1/2 inch wide ribbon
• 2 popcicle sticks
• Fast Grab (or Quick Dry) Tacky Glue
• scissors
• markers, crayons, colored pencils, etc

Prep Work

I designed this so that two dragons printed on each page - I hate wasting cardstock and my printer needs each page hand fed when printing on cardstock so this made it go much faster.  Just cut the templates in half before handing them out.  Cut the ribbon into lengths about one foot.  The ribbon we purchased from Hobby Lobby made 12 puppets per spool (which breaks down to 34 cents per dragon for the ribbon).

Directions

Students (or Scouts) color their own dragon heads and tails and cut them out.  Then using Tacky Glue (the Fast Grab is awesome - the girls were playing with their puppets as soon as they were done gluing and they didn't fall apart!) glue the head to one end of the ribbon and the tail to the other.  Flip over your dragon and glue one popcicle stick behind the head and the other behind the tail.  The first dragon I made I didn't glue this way and his poor head was flopping like he had a broken neck - not so great.

You can also forgo the popcicle sticks and have a pretty cool bookmark.  I would laminate the head and tail pieces before gluing it all together to make it extra strong and possibly cut down the length of the ribbon a bit.