Stories without words? (Therapy with deaf children)

Mr. Jean Paul Pallard. Specialized educator and puppeteer.

Regional Institution for Young Deaf People – Poitiers (11)

 Thanks to the puppet's speech, useful privileged, among others, for communication and non-verbal expression, deaf children can enter this imaginary world populated by princesses and demons.

The workshop we currently have was born in 1990 from the desire and will of a certain number of teachers who worked with deaf children in kindergarten and primary school and who wanted to develop visual communication to allow these students little by little to have access to coded language LSF (French Sign Language).

We also wanted to give the possibility of a better construction of the imaginary through different stories. And a third aspect was to allow students to meet around a story and various activities: mime workshops, visual communication, pre-reading exercises, ideograms, graphics, drawing, painting, collage...

The team leading this workshop is made up of: Three teachers of specialized education (a speech pathologist, an audioprosthetist and an educator from the early medical-social action center -CAMSP-), an LSF teacher, a specialized educator and me . Every Thursday we have the session after lunch and it starts with the explanation of a story with puppets made by the therapeutic team.

Then 4 workshops of half an hour each are organized and the students are divided into 4 groups:

Body expression workshop.

A character from the story seen is explained. A puppet is used and the character is made bodily. The animator explains it in LSF. Finally the students do the story in mime.

Reading workshop.

It helps the students to have pleasure in looking for the books, opening them, finding the characters again... Pictograms are also used to make the logical composition of the story. Games are played.

Manual expression workshop.

Here the puppets that have been seen in the story are made, and the story is relived with the dolls.

Auditory Education Workshop.

It is animated by an audiologist. A lot of work goes into tying an instrument with an animal. For example with a woodpecker puppet, a Chinese box is used. The child notices the vibrations of the box, and when he hits it, the puppet also hits a piece of wood with its beak, and a game is created between the musical instrument and the puppet. Another exercise is done with a xylophone and a squirrel. When the squirrel is up, they play the higher part of the xylophone, and when the squirrel is down, they play the lower part. Later the story is re-enacted and the students understand it better.

The first time they see the puppet show, they don't fully understand it, they don't understand the logical sequence of events, they don't know what the characters are, they can't name them because they don't have the right language.

The second time, they are already starting to name them, because they have worked on it in the Workshops. The third time, three weeks later, allows them to address a logical sequence, the setting itself, the story.

This work with the story is done during half a term. Costeau's underwater world was also worked with shadows. Subsequently, these students have had the habit of going to see puppet shows and of finding out beforehand (going to the library) about the stories they were going to see.