Do your kids love to color? Then these Halloween characters will be perfect for them. They’ll love the cute gang of creatures!

Let them have fun coloring, cutting out, assembling, and then playing with their new Halloween pals. They’ll enjoy seeing their cute creations come to life.

Kids can exercise hand-eye motor skills while trying to keep the puppets standing and giving them funny poses.

Now let’s start!

What You Need

• Character template (download here)
• Plain paper
• Cereal box
• Pipe cleaners
• Wine corks
• Pens, markers, crayons—anything that adds color
• Paint
• Brush
• Hot glue gun & glue
• Scissors
• Cutter

Step 1
Cut bottle corks in half to make the shoes. You can also cut them in quarters for smaller ones. Make a hole on the top of each of the halves using the point of the scissors (see photo above). Then paint and let them dry.

Step 2
Print out the template on plain paper and let the kids color the picture using crayons, markers, or any other coloring tools you might have.

Step 3
Once your characters are colored, glue the paper with the printed characters to the cereal box to get sturdy figures, and then cut them out. (Set aside the hands for later.) Cut out another piece of cereal box for the back of each figure. Each doll will have a front shape with the colored design and the back shape (the plain cereal box) to hide the inside of the puppet.

Step 4
Take one pipe cleaner for the legs, fold it in half, and cut. Take another pipe cleaner stem for the arms. Now lay the back shape of your puppet (the plain cereal box shape) down, wrong side up, and place the legs and arms, then glue. Place the front character shape (your printed colored shape, right side up) on top of it, seal with glue, then press!

Step 5
Cut out four felt hand shapes from the template and use them to sandwich both ends of the pipe cleaner arms. Secure the sandwich together with hot glue and let dry.

Next take each end of the pipe cleaner legs and stick them into each half cork (as shown above).

Step 6
Your puppet is now complete!  You and your kids can create and decorate different shoes, for big or small creatures and to get better balance.

Enjoy!