We've been really impressed with the teamwork in our schools this week as the children worked together to design the sets for their shows!

Happy New Year from the YPPT! We've been busy over the Christmas holidays putting together props kits and backdrop canvases for our projects starting work on their set designs this term, and also preparing for three new exciting projects starting this month - watch this space for more details!

Congratulations to all the children who have worked hard on stringing their puppets this term - between them, they've tied 12,000 knots! We hope you all have a lovely Christmas holiday.

By the end of the 2017-18 academic year, the YPPT had worked with around 900 children and young people. With this year's crop of puppets being strung at the moment, we are delighted to announce that the thousandth YPPT puppet has now been made! Here is the 1000th puppet and his creator, who is working towards his class' production of Macbeth at Bewick Bridge Primary School in Cambridge.

We've been so busy in all our schools that we keep forgetting to take photos for updates! All of our projects are now well into costume designing and making, with many children sewing from patterns for the first time in their lives. They've had to work hard but have worked together through the difficult bits and the costumes are looking great - we can't wait for the puppets to come together at the end of term!

As our Cambridge schools' half-term comes to an end, and our Hertfordshire schools look forward to a week off, here's a quick look back at what we've been up to over the past few months!

Our classes at Bewick Bridge in Cambridge, and Central Primary in Watford have already painted their heads this week - some great characters developing!

Lots of our classes this year have now sculpted their puppet heads and created some amazing characters - we're looking forwards to seeing their puppets develop!

Last week, many of the children at Highwood Primary School were on a residential trip, so we asked our friends at Sculptaface to run a workshop for the children who stayed behind at school. They practised their sculpting and character creating techniques in preparation for making their puppet heads the following week - we were very impressed with the results!

In amongst all our new projects (more on them soon!), the YPPT brought some of our puppets and a basic stage to the Cherry Hinton Festival 2018 and set them up for festivalgoers to have a go. Despite being in the Children's Marquee, the activity was a hit with all ages!