Fairfield High School drama teacher, Elizabeth Choy, thought it would be interesting and cool to learn how to make puppets.
Using videos on YouTube and modeling her creations from images on social media, she created her first two puppets. Naming them after herself and her husband, she brought them into her classroom.
While she was building her first puppet in class five years ago, Choy noticed that one of her students who was autistic picked up one of the puppets and began to open and close the mouth and play with them.
“He wasn’t verbal, didn’t make eye contact.” Choy said about her student. “I noticed how much he enjoyed the puppets and I would let him just pick it up he started mouthing words with the puppet while walking around the class.”
With the two puppets finished, Choy used the second puppet to try to talk with the student but he would run away.
“Eventually our puppets would talk, even though he really didn’t say anything, our puppets would talk and they would make eye contact,” she said. “At first we would just say, ‘Hi, how are you?'”
Choy felt that her student didn’t even know he was communicating with her but that the puppet allowed him to open up.
“It was the one thing that sparked his interest and he just picked it up. I decided right then and there that I was going to teach some puppets,” she said.
Toward the end of the school year, the student began to communicate with Choy without the puppet.
She began incorporating her puppets into her theater classes. The puppets made special needs youths more comfortable getting up on stage, she said, and also helped kids that were shy get out of their shells and get up on stage.
“You don’t have that stage fright when you’re a puppet, because it’s not you, it this other person. You don’t feel afraid to be silly,” said Alexander Camerino, 15, a Fairfield High sophomore, as he sewed up an arm of a puppet Tuesday.
Choy has now added puppet making to the curriculum, teaching her students how to make their own puppets which they will eventually use to act out a scene. With a surplus of completed puppets, Choy decided to pass them on to some of the special education classes around the Fairfield High campus.
She has now drafted students in the school’s drama club program into making puppets for special education programs. The puppets are being sold via Facebook Marketplace for $25-$50 with all the proceeds being funneled back into the school’s drama program.
The flyer the club is planning to circulate throughout the county school districts explains the benefits that Choy has seen in her own classes. Namely, that it is great for reaching out to young, shy or non-verbal students, teaching social skills, developing speech and storytelling.
For questions or inquiries about purchasing a puppet, Choy can be reached at email@example.com.