" The Dog and His Bone" Shadow Puppet Story

The quickest story we performed at our shadow puppet show over winter break was Aesop's "The Dog and His Bone." This is the first one I made and I thought it was great for getting comfortable with the process of making and using shadow puppets for an overhead projector. You could also easily do this show behind a screen. For our purposes, we wanted to perform all the stories using the same methods for simplicity and space reasons.

Like I said, this one was easy to make. I used the patterns in Judy Sierra's Fantastic Theater. I copied the patterns for this story (the dog and the bone) from page 68 onto plain paper and traced it onto black cardstock. Then I cut them out and taped a flexible drinking straw to them. For the text, I like the version found in Jerry Pinkney's collection.

For the backdrop, I used a copyright-free bridge image from Open Clip Art. I cut and pasted it into Publisher, where I adjusted the size. Then I printed out on a transparency sheet (make sure you buy inkjet safe ones if you're using an inkjet printer!!) and drew the water in with blue permanent marker. I could have drawn the water in on the computer but I like the effect the hand-drawn water has.

Happy Second Birthday, Flannel Friday! If you missed it, I wrote last week about "What Flannel Friday Means to Me."