Puppetry and The Kindness Tree
Puppetry is a powerful educational tool that can support learning and allow children and young people to explore potentially sensitive topics with safety. This course provides delegates with a range of scripts that explore topics as diverse as creative writing, inappropriate touching, road safety, dementia and bereavement. The puppets you will use will tell these stories and encourage speaking and listening skills, discussion and problem solving.
Our 1-day training course explores how puppets can be used to discuss challenging topics. This course provides a unique resource to support and enhance your PSHE curriculum and the development of resilience skills as well as the facilitation skills required for effective session delivery.
The extended activities within the course also explore how educators can encourage children and young people to extend and develop the stories through puppetry, giving them:
- Freedom to explore other characters, how they look, behave, respond, and feel
- Confidence in speaking (as attention is on the puppet)
- Bringing to life and animating a situation which can then be broken down and discussed
- Engaging observation and participation in situations with distance and having time to reflect.
This allows for the development of empathy and compassion, along with improved communication and imaginative skills.
A review of the Kindness Tree, “…an excellent resource for all those working with children and young people who are exploring sensitive and delicate topics including personal safety, interpersonal relationships and stress and anxiety. The book is split into three sections – the first offering an overview of why to use puppets, the second outlines the types of puppets to use and the third contains a series of scripts that can be used with puppets to support a particular theme. The scripts can be used as they are or could be adapted by the teacher to meet the needs of the group they are working with. This makes is especially useful for those working with children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. In each script there are “Freeze” moments – these enable the puppet to stop telling the story and ask pertinent questions about the topic being considered…these would be easily adapted to meet the needs of individual pupils.
Each script ends with an activity that the group have to complete. The book is suitable for children and young people of all ages – it just requires a teacher willing to step outside their normal classroom routines and use a puppet to get across some very powerful messages. An excellent book which I would recommend to all my teaching colleagues.”Lorraine Petersen OBE
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