Not only do I like writing articles and books, but I also like writing puppet shows. I’ve been meaning to put my puppet show scripts on my website for a while… Though it took a puppetry workshop for me to finally do it.
Good News Club Puppet Shows
I participate in an after-school club for kids called Good News Club, and one way we share the gospel with the kids is through puppet shows. We started out with some human puppets, but now we have an alpaca and a chicken as well. And our friend has sixteen puppets covering a wide range of species.
Whenever we wanted to do a puppet show, usually for a special event at Club or a holiday like Valentine’s Day, we had to find a script. Strangely, good puppet show scripts are like a rare gem. While there are many empty and worthless books, I could take you to any library and point out dozens of excellent books. However, if you asked me for great puppet shows, I could only recommend a handful.
Maybe puppet shows are a pretty niche thing or something. Regardless, finding good scripts was hard—especially Christian ones. Many times, when we did find one, they were dull or didn’t share the gospel message effectively. One source we used often was scripts from Skit Guys. They have tons of scripts. Some are great, others are… okay…
Our favorite script we found was The Colors of Schmutz by Markus Wolf. It was on an obscure website called Puppet Resources. All of their scripts were free under the maxim, “Freely recieve, freely give,” from Matthew 10:8. I modified the script slightly for the context of a Good News Club, and we’ve done that show many times since.
Still, though, scripts were hard to find. So I started writing them so we could have exactly what we needed. My most recent script, Valentine’s Day Speech, was written for a Valentine’s Day celebration at our church.
The workshop
A few days ago, I did a Puppetry Workshop with my sister and a friend at Christian Youth in Action (CYIA). CYIA is a camp that teaches young people how to run a Good News Club. The leaders of CYIA wanted to give the campers an opportunity to get a grasp on the basics of puppeteering and how they could use puppet shows in their Good News Clubs.
As I prepared our materials for the workshop, I realized that if anyone wanted to put on puppet shows because of our workshop, they would have a hard time finding scripts. And I had a few good ones written, but they weren’t easy to share. So, I got to work and created a special place for them on my website.
Right now, I currently have four scripts online, but I’m starting to work on adding a few more, including the elaborate Fall Festival ones.
