Any early childhood educator can tell you that puppets have been teaching tools for as long as they have existed. The 54 Head Start classrooms at Mid Florida Community Services are no exception: every day, our puppets (which the children eventually name) come out to help their young human friends learn social-emotional skills such as emotion management and empathy.
Once we saw how engaged the children were with the puppets, we decided to take it a step further. Why should the puppets go back into the box after the lesson? Why not integrate them into daily classroom life? To make our puppets full-time members of the classroom, not just guest stars in particular lessons, we decided our students would build homes for the puppets.
Each class worked together to design and build a unique home using recycled materials (watch this video to see some examples). Just this project alone helped the students bond with one another and with their teachers, but the benefits went far beyond the home-building phase.
Now our students, many of whom desperately need a sense of order and structure in their lives, have a constant example of "a place for everything and everything in its place." They understand the importance of taking care of themselves and their property because the puppets encourage them to do so.
For the children, knowing that the puppets are in their puppet homes establishes a sense of safety. Every morning the puppets come out of their homes and welcome the children as part of the attendance process. If children feel anxious or upset about the prospect of staying in class without their parents, they can take their parents to a puppet's home and "talk" to them together. Some of the conversations might be about how the puppets came to school and how they are going to make the children feel better. Helping children during this transition period, and helping them feel safer overall, promotes a positive classroom climate.
The puppet homes also foster language skills as students strive to compare their own homes to the puppet homes and articulate similarities and differences (our students' homes very likely don't have a giant hamster cage on the first floor or look as if they were built by Dr. Seuss). We also talk about some of the things they do at home, how behavior expectations in every home are different, and how we expect the same safe and respectful behavior from everyone at school.
Perhaps the most important benefit of our puppet homes, though, is the fact that the puppets are always there with the kids—and the kids know it. Knowing a puppet might be watching from the window of her home makes our students want to be on their best behavior. When they feel they've done a particularly good job sharing or taking turns, they'll often come up to their teacher to ask if the puppets saw them. And of course, the teachers always assure them that the puppet saw their good behavior and was very impressed!
Having the puppets integrated into classroom life has really helped us integrate social-emotional learning into every aspect of our students' day, which, in turn, creates a safe place for them to become emotionally healthy kids.