What can help a child through a tough year? A very wise puppet

Everyone has feelings about the difficulties of this past year, but young children might not be well-equipped with ways to express them. A new curriculum designed by the Mesner Puppet Theater, in partnership with Johnson County Community College, may help.

Using a new set of puppet characters, the video lessons from “In the Workshop” focus on constructive ways to figure out what you’re feeling, how to tell people about it and what to do when you feel that way. Although it’s intended for a classroom, individual families can purchase access, too.

The program launched in September and will premiere its final 12-minute episode of the year in May. Each video comes with questions and activities to build upon what kids see the puppets do in the show.

“A lot of times, younger kids will talk to puppets if they are not feeling comfortable voicing in their own voice. If you give them a puppet, sometimes they can express their emotions more through those,” said Meghann Henry, producing artistic director for the puppet theater.

Based on teacher feedback that the shows were too long for the younger children with shorter attention spans, organizers broke the last four episodes down into several three-minute segments.

The puppet theater filmed each episode in the college’s Midwest Trust Center theater space. The space usually hosts numerous traveling artists, but that was all canceled this year.

This partnership and subsequent filming projects allowed the center to keep its stage crew on the payroll through the pandemic. Because everything was shut down, the puppet theater also employed local artists and stage crew they wouldn’t normally have been able to hire.

The lesson plans came from Alex Espy, director of education for the puppet theater, who has been working with kids ages 4 to 8 on similar topics for many years.

Henry said they focused on some social-emotional issues, “which are identifying emotions and keeping yourself safe, controlling your body.

“Using your looking eyes, your listening ears are two big pieces around being able to identify emotions. Can you find what the emotion is? How is the character managing that? There are those primal feelings we have when we’re very young and sometimes don’t realize that’s normal.”

For Kara Armstrong, program director for arts education at the Midwest Trust Center, the timing of the content was perfect.

“Kids, in the time of COVID, in the time of such upheaval and change in their daily routines, the resiliency that it teaches them is to be able to say, ‘OK, I feel angry. I can identify that emotion. I can see the other side of it. By identifying it and talking about it, I get to the point where I’m not angry anymore,’” Armstrong said. “They learn that emotions change and that we can work through anything, and we can handle hard things.”

The whole process for filming a children’s TV show is completely different from making a typical stage show. Instead of rehearsing start to finish with one view of the stage, the puppeteers had to adjust to filming things out of order and from multiple angles.

Through grants and money from the Johnson County Community College Foundation, the college was able to underwrite fees for 10 schools to access this new programming.

Including those 10, 15 schools from across the metro bought into the program, from Shawnee Mission to Kansas City. On top of that, the Liberty School District purchased access for all of its 50 kindergarten through second grade classrooms. For an additional charge, students can do a Zoom workshop with the puppets.

Armstrong said they plan to use this content again next year and hope more schools sign up to take part. Also on the horizon, Henry said, is the possibility of creating simpler puppets that teachers can use in the classroom.

Claire Ehney, manager of JCCC’s Hiersteiner Child Development Center, has seen teachers use the program with kids. She jumped at the chance to give their kids a fine arts experience, and the emotional education component made it even better.

“Wearing masks every day, all day inside and outside, we talked about how you can feel people’s feelings and emotions through how their eyes look, since we don’t really have the mouth and those facial expressions,” Ehney said. “It has been a good way for them to maybe find different ways of acting out their emotions.”

To purchase access to episodes of “In the Workshop,” call 913-469-4445 or visit https://www.mesnerpuppets.org//for-families-in-the-workshop

This story was originally published April 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "What can help a child through a tough year? A very wise puppet."