Can you tiptoe your tiger through the forest without making a sound?
We recommend reading The Tiptoeing Tiger by Philippa Leathers (Candlewick Press, 2018, read here by DaddyRead2Me). When Tiger prowls the forest, the other animals NOTICE and move away. But not Little Tiger. No one is afraid of him in the slightest! So he contrives to sneakily tiptoe around the forest until he thoroughly terrifies someone. It doesn’t work with Boar, Elephant, or the monkeys…but Little Tiger might have met his match at the pond!
You’ll need:
- 1 small oatmeal container
- Construction paper and/or poster board
- 2 brass fasteners
- 2 craft sticks, approximately 3″ long
- Scissors, tape, and box cutter for construction
- Markers for decorating
Begin by decorating a small oatmeal container like a tiger. For added texture, we used a pair of wiggle eyes, a bit of self-adhesive foam for the nose, and twisteez wire whiskers, but you can also just use markers to add these features. The dynamic part of the project comes when you add the moveable back legs!
Use a box cutter to make small slices in the oatmeal container, then attach the tiger’s back legs to the body using brass fasteners. Next, attach two, 3″ long craft sticks to the legs, leaving plenty of room for you to grasp the sticks. To operate, move the sticks up and down while gently sliding the oatmeal container forward, and you have yourself a splendid tiptoeing tiger!
Flip the puppet back and forth to reveal a simple, dynamic story! This project was part of our library’s World Kamishibai Day 
It’s way cooler to see the puppet in action though…
A very sweet butterfly…
A single fish that goes “Pop!” and turns into a school of fish…
An exploding firework…
And a girl that duplicates into 5 girls!
If that last one seems a little confusing, it was inspired by a kamishibai performance of Manmaru manma tantakatan (written by Fumiko Araki, and illustrated by Takuya Kusumi). It’s about a ninja boy who duplicates himself to foil a wicked serpent.