One shadow puppet and one small story

The light’s already going, nobody wants to put shoes back on, and the toy box has been tipped out once today. You don’t need a theatre for this one. A paper shape, a torch and a plain bit of wall will do.

Make one character

Pick something your child already knows. Their own cat. A rabbit, a bird, a stick figure with hair sticking up. One is plenty, and one is the point.

Draw it as a bold outline on dark paper or card. Keep the shape thick and simple: fine detail disappears in shadow. Chunky ears, chunky legs, no whiskers.

Then cut it out yourself. If your child is under five, do the cutting for them. You prepare the one puppet, the scissors go back where they live, and your child gets a finished character handed to them. Tape it to a lolly stick, a pencil or a chopstick. A strip of folded card makes a decent stiff handle if there’s nothing else about.

Set the light

Clear the space you’ll be playing in before you dim anything. Shoes out of the way, cables tucked back, the bag someone dropped in the doorway moved out. You’ll both be moving around in low light, so stay in the room with your child once it’s dark.

Point the torch at the wall or a hanging sheet, away from faces, and hold the puppet in between. Start with the torch roughly 30 to 50 cm behind the puppet. The distance is worth playing with. Closer to the wall, the shadow goes smaller and sharper. Farther back, it gets bigger and blurrier. Hand that part over and let your child find it.

A torch or phone torch can warm up after a while. Keep it off skin and put it down between turns.

Full darkness isn’t compulsory. If your child would rather the room stayed partly lit, leave a lamp on in the corner, then look at the wall together and check you can both see the shadow well enough to play with. If it’s washed out, try moving the lamp further away or aiming the torch at a darker stretch of wall.

Let the story start, or don’t

You could start with: your character went for a walk. That’s the whole line. Then hold still and see what comes back.

There are two easy ways to go from there. Your child can talk for the puppet and answer back as it. Or they can keep it quiet and just move it about, walking the shadow up the wall and down again, sliding it towards the light so it looms and back again so it shrinks. Either one is the whole activity. There doesn’t have to be a plot in it anywhere.

Stop whenever your child’s done with it, and keep the puppet somewhere flat if you want to get it out again. If they ask for another character, draw and cut a second one another day.

You can find the fuller version, with more characters and a bit more setting up, in Shadow Puppet Theatre.