Halloween is the best time of the year to make fun crafts. This time, we made these Halloween Puppets with our printable templates.

They are the perfect project for your Halloween parties, classroom celebrations, or just for a stay-at-home Halloween night.

You can even put on a spooky puppet show with your hand puppets after you are done crafting them. There are so many creative stories your kids can come up with!

This set includes 5 different printable Halloween puppets: a zombie, a ghost, a vampire, Jack O’ Lantern, and Frankenstein.

And, there are 2 versions: full-color and black-and-white. We love the full-color versions to set up our puppet show, and the color-in version for classroom parties as the kids love to decorate their puppets in unique ways.

Ready to start crafting and playing with these paper toys?

Get the templates here, or at the end of this post. And scroll down to find the assembling tutorial!

How to Make Halloween Puppets

Making these cute Halloween puppets is not only easy and exciting, but it is also fantastic to let your kids develop some important skills.

When crafting these toys, they will be strengthening their hands’ muscles, working on their focus, attention, and creativity, and developing hand-eye coordination, bilateral coordination, and fine motor skills.

Sounds like the perfect craft, right? Let’s make them now!

Below you can find a complete written tutorial to fold these hand puppets, and also an instructional video right after.

Pick your favorite Halloween design templates and make your puppets!

Materials

The materials you need to create these puppets are:

Printable Halloween Puppet Templates (grab them here or at the end of the post)
White cardstock
Printer
Scissors
Glue
Crafting Knive (for some designs)
Coloring pencils, markers, or crayons (if you are using the black and white templates)

Instructions

Download and print the Halloween Puppet templates on white cardstock.

If you printed the black and white version of these puppets, now it’s the time to let your kids color them in with coloring pencils, markers, or crayons.

Make a cut to separate the puppet from the accessories. Do not cut out the dotted lines as we will use them for the next step.

Fold the puppets along the 3 dotted lines. You can use a ruler to fold straight lines seamlessly.

Cut out the puppets and the accessories.

If you are making the zombie, cut a slit on the lower lip with a craft knife. Then, put glue on the teeth, insert them through the slit, and paste them.

Cut slits to glue the teeth on the vampire and zombie templates

* If you are making the vampire, cut 2 slits on the upper lips. Insert the fangs through the slits and glue them.

Glue all the accessories on each puppet.

Put the coat behind the vampire’s face, the stem behind the top of the pumpkin, the brain on top of the zombie’s head, and the screws on the sides of Frankenstein’s head.

Now, it’s time to reverse the folds made in step 4.

Fold the puppet in half. Then, fold up the side with the eyes.

Fold puppet in half and bring the face up

Flip over the puppet and fold up the bottom.

For the final step, fold the edges of the straps.

Glue the straps arched behind the puppets, as shown below.

Place your hand and thumb into the loops to make your puppet move.

Place your hand and thumb into the puppet

Your paper puppets are ready for the show!

Halloween Paper Puppets Video Tutorial

If you got stuck on any of the steps above, in this video, I show you exactly how I made these Halloween hand puppets with our printable templates.

Take a look!