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Materials you will need for the puppet are

• two long (2 ft) pieces of wool or string   (the smaller the kids, the shorter you should make it... you can always shorten it later if you need to),
• a few shorter snippets of wool or string
• OPTIONAL:  straws (Gayla wrote that flex straws are neat to use.)
• a printer,
• glue,
• scissors,
• something to colour or paint with
• some poster board or cardboard (empty cereal boxes work great and we recently discovered frozen food dinner boxes also work *grin*)
• and 4 pieces of paper .

INSTRUCTIONS:

• Print out the template (4 templates).
   
• Cut the template pieces out
  • doesn't have to be exact at this point, because we'll have to cut the pieces out again. 
  • This is a good time for younger kids to do the cutting. 
  • Just tell them to cut about an inch or two outside the lines.
    
• Glue the pieces to the cardboard, SEPARATELY (don't try to make it look like a monkey yet)
    
• Colour or paint the template pieces as appropriate (you don't really need to wait until the glue dries, but you certainly can!).
   
• OPTIONAL:  You can glue bits of brown wool onto the body if you want to add some texture to the project.
   
• Once dry, cut out the template pieces (this is where an adult will come in handy... cardboard is a bit tougher to cut through).   
   
• Turn the pieces all face down and assemble them on the table to look like a monkey, leaving about an inch between each piece.  
  • You can position the tail a number of different ways (hanging down, pointing up, out to one side)
  • You can also substitute a braided rope/wool tail for the paper template piece if you are teaching your child how to braid.
      
• Take snippets of string and drinking straws and tape them to connect the pieces -- use straws to connect the tail, legs and one arm.  Use string to connect the other arm.  (see the picture below for what I did with the dinosaur... it's the same idea for the monkey)

• Take your 2 long strings and glue/tape them to the back of the head and to one arm (the arm you attached with string)
     
• Now lay it down on the table and stretch the strings up. 
  • Measure and trim so the strings are the right height for your child (leaving enough to make loops in the end of the string) and
  • so the strings are all the same length with the monkey positioned normally. 
     
• Tie loops in the ends of the string to put your hands through (or just tie the ends of the string to make one big loop). 
   
• Once everything including the string attachments are completely dry, you can make your monkey puppet jump on the bed!
   

Head/Body template   (color)   (B&W)

Arm template   (color)   (B&W)

Arm/Tail template   (color)   (B&W)

Legs template   (color)   (B&W)