Octopus's Garden

Once again we were inspired by a song for this week’s unplug your kids challenge for garden.

We got a few new puppets recently, including an octopus, a shark and a dolphin. Perhaps you’ve guessed that our song of inspiration is the classic Octopus’s Garden by the Beatles.

Early on in the week we thought up stories that took place in an Octopus’s garden. Jaylene’s was quite detailed and we’re making it into a book. She’s taking her time on the illustrations so they’re not ready for public viewing at the moment. There have been lots of puppet shows of course. The octopus is cleverly constructed using a glove for his tentacles.

And we also downloaded these Sea Critters Cards so that we could learn what kinds of plants and creatures would be playing in our garden (note, link is to a pdf file, check out the Aquarium Website first if you prefer).

Of course, having one cool octopus glove puppet is not enough if there are two children. You need at least a pair of octopi. So we made a baby one for Jayden.

Materials:

A glove (ours had a plastic character on it, which made sewing it a bit easier I think).
Felt cut in a circle (I cut around a ball pit ball because that was the approximate size I wanted)
Something for eyes (we used stickers and Jayden promptly pulled them off)
Needle, thread, stuffing.

Jaylene did some easy/lazy stitching around the edge. It doesn’t have to be pretty or precise, because it’s just to pull the edges of the felt together to create the head. Then we stuffed it and I sewed it to the glove.

And here’s the finished result!