Puppetools is a website that offers access to several paper puppet patterns and videos for teachers to use as inspiration in applying puppet use in their classroom. 

Puppets and imaginative play are very useful in teaching young children.  The benefits of creative play is really the heart beat of this site.  They promote their beliefs of puppet importance through scientific articles and sheer excitement for their site.

Though I respect and agree with their beliefs, I thought the site itself was pretty dry.  Things were hard to find.  They have been working on improving this though, and I have been happy to see the site becoming more colorful and user-friendly.

Creativity needs a voice in the scientific community to promote it's value and inspire the very technical and rigid scientific mind of it's worth.  Puppetools creators do this.  They speak at conferences and such to explain creativity to scientists in ways they will respect.  For that I respect them.

 The thing about having a creative site that gears itself toward teachers and children is that you expect something colorful.  You expect a creative/ imagination based product to have more play and visual draw to it.  Puppetools was not what I expected.  Again, they are working to make their site more imaginative visually.  We'll see what they come up with.  It's already looking better though.

Wen we first started, it was grey and solemn on their site.  It looked sort of boring to me

We did try to build a few puppets.  We used the bee pattern.  Here are pictures of my kids playing with their puppets in the yard.

They turned out cute visually, but were kind of hard to use.  The whole body moves when the mouth moves and that can get annoying after a while. 

Our favorite part of useing Puppetools was the fun of actually making the puppets. 

You can find them at www.puppetools.com

Their site is fee based and costs $99 yearly for group access, or $20 for a 60 day trial for an individual user.  My recommendation is the 20 day trial.  This will allow you to get inspiration, learn how to create and use their hinges and print out some patterns.