Zaitsev's cubes, Nikitin's games, lacing - all these words are well known to mothers. Modern society has become very fascinated early childhood development. It seems that every year there are some new techniques that caring mothers immediately begin to apply, and grandmothers just shrug their shoulders, wondering how they could raise their children without all these smart methods.
But was there really no way to develop babies before? Of course they were! Moreover, some of them are still very popular. One of these methods is puppet show. It helps not only to develop various skills in a child, but also allows adults to look again into such a coveted country of childhood.
How useful is puppet theater for children?
puppet show- an exciting, vivid spectacle that allows spectators and participants to be transported to a fairy-tale land. But besides the fact that such an event brings joy and pleasure, puppet theater will also help:
1. Develop memory and imagination. Preparing for his role, the baby listens, remembers and repeats the words of his hero, which contributes to memory training. In the future, he will learn not only to memorize, but also to invent and build his correct sentences. And there, maybe he will come up with his own script.
2. Develop motor skills of the hands. Taking the doll in his hands, the child begins to feel it, try it on, which contributes to the development of fine motor skills of the hands. And by controlling his hero, setting him in motion, the child learns to control his own actions.
3. Understand what is good and what is bad. A fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it ... With the help of a fairy tale, you can not only entertain a child, but also explain to him which actions are good and which are bad.
4. Teach communication skills. During the game, the baby communicates with other children and learns to cooperate with them - not to take away toys, not to shout out their words first.
5. Overcome shyness. Having entered the taste of the game, the kid will be able to feel like a real little actor performing on his impromptu stage, which will undoubtedly teach him to be more self-confident in the future.
6. Get joy from communicating with loved ones. Time spent with parents is the most valuable thing for a child, and if this time passes so excitingly, it is triple interesting.
How to organize a children's puppet theater at home
Having decided to organize a puppet show at home, you need to decide on the following things: where to play and what to play with.
Venue for home puppet theater
The convenience of the puppet theater is that it can be played everywhere. Even if the apartment is very small, you can always find a place where you can improvise with dolls. It could be:
- Any flat surface - table, chair, floor. Such a theater is more suitable for very young children, when a parent takes any toy and enlivens it with his own hands and words.
- Cardboard box. Taking such a box and cutting out one of the walls, you can get a wonderful scene. And if you still make holes and hang fabric on a wire, you get a real curtain.
— Ready puppet theater. Today in the toy store you can find a ready-made screen for puppet shows. And they come in different sizes: from the smallest, placed on the table, to large, occupying half a room.
The choice of characters for theatrical performance
Having decided on the venue, you need to “hire actors”.
The choice of toys for the puppet theater very large, it can be:
- Everyday baby toys. Favorite doll Masha, a teddy bear and even a tractor - all this can be used in a puppet show. It is good if the dolls have several outfits that can be changed during the performance.
- Handy materials. In fairy tales, everything comes to life, which means that anything can be their characters: twigs, cones, leaves, chestnuts - the main thing is to show imagination.It will turn out to be such an eco-theatre.
- Glove dolls. These are perhaps the most popular actors of puppet shows. Wearing such a glove on your hand, you can revive a frog, a bear cub and even a dragon. You can buy them in stores, or you can make them yourself - on the Internet you can find a lot of instructions for sewing such dolls.
- Finger puppets. Such puppets are designed for a mini-theatre. They are very convenient for little fingers, even the smallest novice actors will not find it difficult to manage them.
- Dolls on sticks. Suitable for riding theatre, when the puppeteers are hidden behind a screen. Such dolls are made mainly with their own hands. A stick is attached to the base of paper or wood (or you can take a finger puppet), with the help of which the future character is controlled.
- Puppets. The most interesting and complex dolls. By pulling the strings that are attached to the arms, legs and head of the doll, the puppeteer sets it in motion. But to learn how to manage such a character, you need time and dexterity.Suitable for children from 4-5 years old and adults.
It is not difficult to create your own home puppet theater, you just need to show imagination and imagination. And you should definitely involve children in this exciting business - by making toys and a stage together, you can not only spend time together with interest, but also teach your baby to be creative and independent. And it will be so wonderful to say later: “Attention, curtain!”
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The theater has a huge educational potential. Its impact on the child's emotions is very strong, because children live life together with the hero on stage, rejoice, worry, sympathize. Since they have developed concrete-figurative thinking, it is precisely what is happening on the stage, the scenery, the acting of actors that gives them the opportunity to better understand and more vividly perceive the familiar plots and characters of the characters.
The simplest theatrical performances with the participation of the baby's favorite toys are not just entertainment, but also an opportunity for parents to contribute to the development of speech, memory, creativity, moral traits, friendliness, and broadening the horizons of the child. A child can prepare scenery, thereby showing himself as an artist and designer, think over costumes, write a script, play a role. Opportunities for the theater are great, even if it's just a home performance.
Playful theatrical techniques are used by psychologists in their work to help the child deal with his fears, complexes, and self-doubt. The child begins to change on his own, without the instructions of an adult, without his instructions and reproaches. He learns to communicate, since the theater needs teamwork, hidden abilities are manifested even in those children who considered themselves incapable of anything. They are imbued with art, its diversity, because the theater is a synthesis of music, words, painting, choreography, design. And as you know, art can heal the soul.
In the home theater, the most important thing is to help the child open up, realize himself, free his creativity. Therefore, strict criticism is not the place here. Theatrical game teaches the child to interact with others, to look for a solution to the problem, to bring things to the end.
Home theater for kids 3-5 years old
They can already be involved in the preparation of the production, giving small roles and tasks. It is worth playing skits according to an already familiar fairy tale or story. They like to read the same plot many times, and a small performance with familiar and favorite characters will be met with a bang and will help to better understand the plot and feel the emotions of the characters. It is better to choose simple fairy tales for kids, where we are talking about friendship, mutual assistance, justice, etc. And gradually expand the repertoire to maintain the interest of the child.
At this age, children can already play on their own, the duration of the performance is about 15-20 minutes. It can be fairy tales: “Ryaba Hen”, “Teremok”, “Turnip”, fragments from the works of K. Chukovsky. Up to 4 years, it is better to do a puppet show for an adult, and with kids to play simple plot scenes with puppets. The performance behind the screen can be organized for children from the age of 6.
Theater for children 7-13 years old
This is the age when the child wants and can take over the entire theatrical production. The task of the parent is to support the children's initiative, not to interfere with independence, and, if necessary, to tactfully help. It is important to discuss the main goal of the production: a gift for a holiday, for some date, to cheer up kids, friends, relatives.
Home theater organization
You can choose any suitable place in the apartment. Puppet theatrical performances can be played on the table, floor, make a house, a small screen. For a performance with roles, it is worth considering the scenery, but it is not necessary to make it complicated, use everything that is available. From cardboard, for example, you can come up with a screen or cut a tree, draw a house, etc. Children especially like costumes, let them come up with them (depending on age) and try to bring their sketches to life. This perfectly develops imagination, needlework skills, diligence, and just fun and interesting.
For most children, home theater is a significant event, because it is much more exciting than traditional games. You can act out funny scenes together, introduce the baby to a fairy tale and its characters, and introduce an element of fantasy. Believe me, the child himself will not notice how he will become the main participant and director of the fairy tale.
Try everything together with your child and become his best friend and helper. By creating a home theater, you learn to make puppets together, sew costumes, draw scenery, write a script, design a stage and, of course, show the play itself. 
Home puppet theater for the little ones
For the little ones, puppet theater is ideal, as they are not yet ready to learn the roles and go on stage in front of their parents or relatives. Puppet theater is very similar to the usual game with toys. For kids, familiar folk tales are suitable.
Do not forget to fantasize: introduce new characters, add funny episodes, or redo the ending.
It is equally interesting to compose and play your own story. To begin with, it will be better if you act out the performance yourself. And over time, the kid will join the game by choosing his favorite character. You can buy a puppet theater, or create your own hands, it's up to you.
Separately, it is worth mentioning magnetic theaters, as a wonderful way to develop figurative and creative thinking in preschoolers. Magnetic kits allow preschool children to create their own fairy tales and stories on their own.
Costumes and scenery for home theater
A little older kids can go from puppet theater to the "real" with roles, costumes and scenery.
- When preparing costumes, old dresses, shreds of fabrics, scarves will be used.
- For makeup, donate the contents of your cosmetic bag, for sure there will be a lot of unnecessary cosmetics there.
- Music is what brings the story to life. To make the performance more cheerful and bright, you can choose musical accompaniment. Record to a disc and play music at a low volume during the performance.
- Pull the rope and hang a large piece of canvas or curtains on it - that's how the screen turned out. You can decorate the screen with flowers cut out of paper, birds, stars or snowflakes, depending on your imagination and the theme of the performance.
- What is a theater without scenery? Preparing them at home can take time. Make the scenery so that they can be used in other performances. For example, trees can be painted green on one side and yellow on the other to represent autumn and summer. You can pull a thread and hang on it, carved from cardboard, the sun and clouds. Create together with the baby, think together what else can be done.
The child will be happy to take part in the design of the stage. It does not matter if something is cut out and painted inaccurately, it is important that the child did it with pleasure. Create with the baby, invent with him.
For yourself, leave the role of the narrator - someone must lead the story: “Once upon a time there was a grandfather and a woman ...” and manage the whole process: follow the output of small artists, suggest words if someone gets excited.
The main thing to remember is that children are not actors. They don't have the patience to learn their parts by heart, so don't try to get them to act like they're in perfect harmony. So you can easily discourage interest in your exciting undertaking.
Do not spare time for home productions - the result will be worth it, because for the kids this is a real holiday.
You can arrange a real holiday with a performance. Give theater tickets specially drawn for the occasion to relatives, neighbors or loved ones. Also, do not forget to arrange an intermission with sweets and drinks.
Benefits of home theater
Home theater will help teach a child to conduct a dialogue correctly, look for a way out of difficult situations, develop memory and independent thinking, and enrich vocabulary. And children's memory will keep vivid impressions of your exciting time spent together.
Theatrical games develop expressive speech and creativity in children. And although the hobby for home theater, as a rule, ends with childhood, communication skills, improvisation, fantasy, and most importantly, conversational skills remain. Any performances liberate the child and help overcome shyness.
Prepared by Maryana Chornovil
In pre-revolutionary Russia, home performances were part of the everyday life of the nobility. From home theaters to live action, impromptu performances were very popular. Not a single summer season was complete without a performance, the scenery was a garden, a pond or picturesque sunsets over the lake, as in Chekhov's The Seagull. Christmas performances with a baby sleeping in a manger, the Magi and King Herod were traditional.
The romance of Alexander Blok and his Beautiful Lady, Lyubov Mendeleeva, began after a home performance in which the poet played Hamlet and his young lover Ophelia. In Yasnaya Polyana home performances staged according to plays specially written by Count Tolstoy, and in the Yasnaya Polyana performances, the people played kings, and the count's family - commoners.
The wonderful traditions of home performances became a thing of the past after the revolution. Everything new is a well-forgotten old, so it's time to revive a beautiful tradition.
Select scaffolding. If a “real” theater begins with a hanger, then a home theater begins with the choice of a stage. The choice of the play, the scenery, the number of actors, and the number of spectators will depend on this. If you are going to make a theatrical production in the country or in the courtyard in the best aristocratic traditions, where there is a lot of space, then you can handle complex plays with a large number of actors. At least put "War and Peace".
If you only have a tiny one at your disposal, you can replace the performance with “living pictures”, representing a small excerpt from a work or painting by famous artists.
Alena, 27 years old:
My friends and I were spending the weekend in my grandmother's village when the hurricane cut off the electricity for two days. We had already played a hundred times both "crocodile" and "association", when suddenly my sister pulled out such and such an old dress, a scarf from her grandmother's closet, wrapped herself up, lit a candle and began to read Tatyana's letter to Onegin. We all jumped into the game and my then-boyfriend and I showed the final scene of Romeo and Juliet. At the phrase “Oh greedy, you drank everything,” the audience neighed like crazy, because just the day before, Igor went over a little with alcohol.
Since then, whenever we get together with our cheerful company, we show such small excerpts from our favorite works. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll take a swing at a home performance.
Play. If your performance will be timed to coincide with a holiday, then you can choose something thematic for staging: for example, The Nutcracker for New Year's Eve.
In general, the good thing about a home performance (and the role of a home director) is that you are given complete freedom of action. Romeo and Juliet didn't die, but got married and had a bunch of kids? Please! Did the three sisters go to Moscow after all? As much as you like!
Only one piece of advice can be given: do not take a scenario that is too tragic with a sad ending. Sure, we can all be drama queens if we want to, but for a debut, Pygmalion is still preferable to King Lear.
Well, if you have a certain literary talent, then you can write a script for your favorite work of art and stage your own play based on it.
Larisa, 34 years old, mother of 6 children:
— Every Christmas, my children and I put on a small play dedicated to the birth of Jesus. My husband and I portray Mary and Joseph, the boys are the Magi, the sweet-daughter is the Christmas star, and one of the smallest is a baby. Previously, the little one almost arranged a fight because of the main role, so now we have an agreement: whoever behaves best during the year will be in the nursery. Here is such a cunning educational move.
Casting. When choosing a play, you need to take into account the number of potential actors, so that later you don’t have to call your acquaintances with the plaintive “Waa-a-asenka, well, come on, you will be our hero-lover.” In extreme cases, episodic characters can be played by the same person.
The number of people employed in the performance can be calculated using the formula "actor composition + 1". "+1" is a director, a prompter, a sound engineer and a lighting engineer all rolled into one.
When staging a simple play, "+1" may not be necessary, and you will also be able to participate. But if the play is complex, in several acts, you will have to forget about acting glory. If the scene beckons you, then entrust the direction to one of the older relatives - your mother or grandmother will gladly take command of the parade.
Props. In the manufacture of scenery, our faithful assistants are stationery and grocery stores. We are interested in grocery stores as a source of various boxes, boxes and other thick cardboard from which you can make screens by painting them or pasting them with photographic paper.
In specialized stores you can buy any carnival costume. If you buy costumes not on the eve of Halloween or the New Year, when a modest dress of an extra can undermine the entire budget of the performance, you can even save money.
If you know how to sew at least a little, then beautiful fabric and a few lines are enough to make the dress of an empress or grand dame. Moreover, making a crown out of shiny paper is a matter of ten minutes.
Creativity in children needs constant nourishment. And sometimes the standard toys at home are no longer very pleasing. They want more - their own performances, invented stories that can be shown to parents in an unusual form. The game of shadows in this case becomes an excellent solution. Consider how to make a shadow theater with your own hands at home and what you need for this.
What can become a shadow theater
Of course, the main characters in any shadow theater plot will be the shadows themselves. However, there may be several options for how and on what they can be obtained.
 | Hand movements | You can make a theater with your own hands in the literal sense of these words. Probably, many, at a convenient angle and occasion, create all kinds of figurines of birds, fish, animals from their hands on the wall. But you can turn improvisation into a real art if you learn how to correctly group your hands for a particular character. |
 | Shadow theater on the wall | If you have a large spotlight or lamp at home, as well as a lot of free space, you can direct the light at an angle to a wall that does not have unnecessary objects. Children stand under these rays and begin to act out scenes, I'm interested in poses. Figures cut from a stencil can also be reflected on the wall. You can cover the spotlight itself and the "screenwriters" with a screen made with your own hands from chairs and bedspreads. |
 | Performance on stage | The audience sits in the dark, and in front of them is a "screen". Manipulation with figures made of cardboard, wood or plain paper takes place between the front wall of the stage and the lamp. |
How to make a shadow theater with your own hands at home
If with the first two options it’s quite simple to come up with everything, then with the third one you need to try. You can go the simple route and use a simple cardboard box as the basis for the scene. For example, from household appliances. A white sheet or thin white paper is stretched over the box. Special paper for patterns is also suitable - it has an optimal density and does not shine through.
Figures can be made with your own hands from different materials, but cardboard is best suited for this role, because it will be possible to cut out thin details from it (handles, legs, tails, smooth bends). You can come up with characters yourself or use stencils.
- Initially, cut out two identical parts from cardboard and, when gluing them, lay a part of the cane inside from below.
- Glue the cane to the back of the figurine with tape. You can take a tube, cut its tip into strips, arrange them to the sides and glue these strips to the back of the hero.
- Glue with glue.
The cane itself can be a wooden skewer, a toothpick, a plastic tube. The decorations are made in the same way as the characters and are attached to the foam or any other material suitable for this.
If you want to make shadow theater even more interesting for children with your own hands, you can make individual parts of the characters movable. They are cut out and attached to the main part with wire or thread. To do this, holes are made on both sides. The movable part also needs to be attached to a skewer, or even better - put on a thread, for which the child himself can pull up at the right time - the character’s arm or leg will magically rise, the bird will fly away.
The light source in this case can be an ordinary lamp, which will shine at a right angle to the back of the stage, highlighting the figures of shadow theater heroes. But it would still be safer to use a flashlight.
Interesting exciting games that can be used with great enthusiasm by children in kindergarten and at children's birthday parties. You can start by staging the simplest ordinary fairy tales, where only 3-4 characters are used (for example, “Ryaba the Hen”), and then do original performances with children for grandparents in several hands.
