Printable Ushpizin Puppets - Sukkot Craft for Kids

Craft these fun Ushpizin puppets Sukkot craft for kids to play with and follow along! When you’re done, check out these beautiful Suncatcher Sukkah Decorations. This post contains affiliate links.

Sukkot is coming, with so many rich traditions to celebrate! I hope you and your kids are already having fun decorating your sukkah – check out this fun kids’ art chain for some awesome ideas!

For now, I have a non-decoration Sukkah craft (although you can definitely use this as such as well.

One of our favorite Sukkot customs is Ushpizin – we invite a different “guest” from ancient Jewish history to join us in our sukkah each night of the holiday. This is a wonderful time to discuss their stories and the values we learn from them.

I created these simple stick puppets to make it easier and more fun to bring this tradition alive. I find that puppets really encourage people to let out their inner actor or storyteller. Plus, having the prop to hold onto makes the experience multisensory and engaging.

This is a wonderful craft for home or school. It can easily be adapted to different skill levels – you (or your Cricut) can pre-cut the characters to give younger children a head start. Older kids can cut it out themselves and add more detail in their coloring.

All about the Puppets

Each one of the Ushpizin is pictured with a symbol they are known for to help prompt discussion of what we can learn from their stories:

Abraham/Avraham is holding a tray ready to serve his guests.
Isaac/Yitzhak was blind in his old age, and is also shown with the ram of the binding peeking behind him.
Jacob/Yaakov is holding a sack to symbolize the many journeys he took, and is pictured with the ladder and rock from his famous dream.
Moses/Moshe holds the tablets/luchot that he brought from Sinai, and is pictured with his staff that turned into a snake in Egypt.
Aaron is wearing his special High Priest/Kohen Gadol uniform and accessories.
Joseph/Yosef is wearing the striped coat his father gifted him.
King David (a redhead, as tradition teaches) is holding his harp.

Of course, all the puppets are imaginary depictions since we can’t know what these ancient greats really looked like. They’re just illustrations to help our children enjoy visualizing their stories.

You can even load them right into a Cricut or die cutting machine with a “print then cut” feature to save another step – both the colored and outline versions come with a PNG file that will make cutting super easy.

Of course, if you prefer to put your kids’ fine motor skills to work, you can just print the PDF and hand out scissors.

Download the Ushpizin Puppets

You can print these puppets in color for a ready made presentation, or grab the outline version so you or your kids can enjoy a bonus coloring activity. This is a premium download, available in my Etsy shop for personal or classroom use.

GET THE COLOR-IN PUPPETS HERE

GET THE FULL COLOR PUPPETS HERE

More tips for assembling your Ushpizin Puppets

If you really love your puppets, you can consider laminating the images before attaching the stick to help them stay strong throughout the holiday. Of course, if they do fall apart, that just means you can have fun making them again next year – the template is yours for keeps as many times as you need it for personal or classroom use.

Feel free to expand on the original craft idea if you’d like by adding details with fabric (perhaps a cape for King David?), glitter (maybe on Aaron’s breastplate and headpiece) or whatever you can think of – share your creative ideas in the comments!

Of course, you can string these up into a garland to make a fun and playful sukkah decoration or mount them on the wall in a gallery, instead of making puppets!

Grab your template here and let’s get started!