This is a book that will inspire any child to create their own puppet. This book is layout with a finished product and a poem on one page followed by several pages depicting materials that can be used followed by directions on how to begin the project. Several beautiful photographs of children in the creative process are included to entice children even more. ( )

The premise of this book is pretty interesting. Puppet based crafts for children could be used in a variety of different classes from reading/language arts to art and music. One thing that could be concerning about using this book for young students would be the number of small items that the puppets can contain. Lots of googly eyes, buttons, and brads could make for a lot of monitoring in order to ensure that students don't use them in an incorrect way. The projects themselves are pretty interesting and include finger puppets all the way to a large sized Chinese dragon that is comprised of several paper plates. While there are some complicated aspects to the projects overall the puppets are clearly directed to pre k-3 students. Older students would probably feel unchallenged by these tasks. Depending upon what materials are used there can be a tremendous likelihood of these projects being quite messy, but they look to be messy in the way most children enjoy. There is lots of glitter, paints, tape to color on, and marker usage to allow for a lot of creative freedom in each project. The book has some very nice photographs in it, but upon reading I did note that there could be more step by step photos as the directs are occasionally unclear. Overall the book is filled with fun projects that could be modified to support classroom activities such as puppet shows of books that the students have read. ( )