During our October meeting, the BEF had the pleasure of hearing from Jill Arnold, a recent Idea Lab Grant Winner and recipient of the Elizabeth Ascoli Award for Innovation in Experiential Learning. Jill is a speech language pathologist at Pierce School and her goal was to infuse theater, reader’s theater, puppetry and pretend play into speech and language therapy for K–4 students. This Idea Lab Grant enabled her to bring her lifelong love of theater into her therapy sessions, a dream she had always hoped to realize.
After taking a “Making Puppets from Nothing” course at the Puppet Showplace Theater in Brookline, watching puppeteer performances and buying a puppet stage for her classroom, she began working with her students on creating people and animal puppets. What started off as reading and performing theater scripts soon morphed into students generating their own plays. Working with the puppets promoted social skills, enhanced teamwork, collaboration and problem-solving. In addition, puppetry became a
natural setting for practicing vocabulary and sentence structure.
Examples of puppet show stage and pretend play include creating a grocery store, running a bakery, bringing stories to life and creating a skit to teach personal space. For World Puppetry Day, the students prepared for a week-long celebration.
Jill is looking forward to keeping up with this project and bringing more theater arts to the therapy world. According to Jill, the project has been magical, and the BEF is so glad to have played a role in fostering creativity and helping to positively impact academic and social success.
