Make Your Own Potato People

Have you ever read a Pamela Allen book? They are LOTS of fun to read, with plenty of hilarious noises and opportunities for theatre. I have loved them since I was a child – I was nine when her first book was published. Pebble and I enjoy reading lots of Pamela Allen books, and one of our favourites is The Potato People. This is a quieter book, with a few tugs at the old heart strings. Pebble doesn’t necessarily understand the sentiment behind it just yet, but she certainly loves to read about how Jack and his Grandma create their very own Potato People. Which led us to: “Mummy, can we make those too?”. Yes, we can.

How to make your own potato people

You will need:

• Potatoes – we used baby potatoes
• Glue or sticky tape – we used a low melt glue gun
• Bits and pieces for making your potato people, eg:
  • Bottle tops
  • Fabric (one of my favourite dresses that I tore a hole in and am not clever enough to fix *cry*)
  • Dried beans
  • Toothpicks
  • Wool
  • Permanent marker
  • Your imagination!

To Make:

• Use toothpicks to secure one potato on top of the other, creating a head and a body.
• Use more toothpicks to create arms and legs. We used a third ‘leg’ to stabilise our potato people so that they could stand up on their own.
• Use the bits and pieces to decorate your potato people. We used dried beans for eyes, wool and play dough for hair, bottle tops for hats, and fabric for clothes.

You can be as simple or as detailed as you like with your designs. Pebble was quite happy to leave some of her potato people nude, while one wore a dress and another wore just marker (body paint?!). Pebble (almost three) needed quite a lot of help with rolling and cutting the hair, and pushing the toothpicks in, but was happy in her role as craft dictator while I did the fiddly bits. Older children could easily make these on their own. I think this activity would be great fun to try with a loaded craft trolley, a bag of old potatoes and a class of six year olds!

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever made with a potato?

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