How Can Puppets Help Children Develop Essential Life Skills

Have you ever wondered about innovative and creative methods to teach your children social skills? With the ongoing pandemic, our kids are confined to their homes or backyards. That said, it wouldn’t be wrong to state that this is stunting their social growth. This is where hand puppets of all kinds, especially the kids’ all-time-favorites, the dinosaur puppets, come in handy.

You might want to check in with Only Dinosaurs and see their amazing range of dinosaur puppets for your kids. As we mentioned before, puppets can serve as a creative source to provide your kids with innovative learning opportunities that can assist in certain development areas.

Puppets of all kinds, including dinosaur puppets, are captivating and engaging toys. When kids engage with the toys, their language, communication, emotional learning, social engagement skills get supported as they understand the world around them by using a safe yet imaginative learning medium.

Puppets & Language Development

There are various puppets available in the markets and online stores, such as finger puppets, hand puppets, marionettes, etc. These puppets can serve as an essential source of entertainment when incorporated in at-home-staged puppet theatres.

Most children make friends with puppets as they play different puppets’ characters by having them interact with each other in certain social situations. For instance, if you were to encourage your children to stage a puppet theatre and play a princess’s story in distress. The princess puppet gets carried away by the dinosaur puppets who fly with her to the hills. Subsequently, the princess is rescued by the dwarf puppets.

That said, puppets are a captivating entertainment source for children of different ages, and their interaction with the puppets displays the children’s knowledge of the world. If the children communicate with each other or with their parents through the puppet, they feel less intimidated.

For many children, puppets become a gateway to a new communication world that allows them to acquire and work on their language skills. While playing with puppets, children learn how to communicate their thoughts by converting them into words during role-play. That said, puppets actively assist with language development in children, and each role-plays or staged drama can be used to learn new vocabulary.

Puppets & Social Development

As previously mentioned, children don’t feel intimidated while playing with puppets. They are able to say things that they might not be sharing otherwise, sans the puppets. That said, playing with puppets allows children to re-enact certain social situations that they can relate to. For instance, if a disagreement between the characters occurs during a re-enactment, children will use their characters while reacting in a way with which they would have responded in real-life situations. This process of role-playing and staged puppet theatres allows children to learn about positive social skills.

As a parent, you can make the most out of this pandemic by encouraging your kids to play with puppets and learn positive social and communication skills. You can also use puppets to teach children about empathy, compassion, and respect.