Our children: Puppet pals teach children resiliency, social skills

This is one in a series of stories looking at efforts to improve children’s lives. 

Teacher Jackee Emard held up a gallon-sized plastic jug and rotated it to swirl the red liquid inside, captivating the 4- and 5-year-olds who sat around her feet on a blue rug.

"If you get really annoyed, and really frustrated, do you sometimes feel like you're going to explode?" she asked. Yes, the children responded in unison.

Emard slowly poured the concoction — vinegar dyed red — into a clear plastic cup filled with baking soda. A frothy pink foam rose up and bubbled over the sides, plopping down onto a plastic tray and drawing shrieks and laughs.

"Is that sometimes how you feel?" she said.

"Yes!" the class yelled.

The demonstration inside a sun-filled classroom in Lansing — about feeling annoyed and how to cope with it — was part of Al's Pals: Kids Making Healthy Choices, a curriculum aimed at developing young children's social-emotional and problem-solving skills. The nationally recognized, evidence-based program is designed for all children ages 3 through 8, but it's especially geared toward helping high-risk students who live in poverty or may face other challenging situations at home.

The centerpiece of Al's Pals is three puppets: Al, the star and role model, and his friends Keisha and Ty. The characters act out scenes as part of lessons on topics ranging from nutritious eating to how to deal with anger and resolve conflicts peacefully. There's also a music component, with sing-a-long songs that have titles like "Stop! Think!" and "I'm a Healthy Child."

Two decades after it was created, the program is now in 38 states, Canada and Bermuda. In Michigan, it is used not only in the Lansing area but also Paw Paw, Westland, Mason, Redford and Hartford.

"We’re developing those internal traits of social competence and problem-solving ability and a sense of self, a sense of future, a sense of empathy," said Sue Geller, Al's Pals creator and president of the Virginia-based company that produces it."They're things that make good employees and good spouses and good friends. It’s what you need for life, as well as to be successful in school."

David Rosenberg, chairman of psychiatry at Wayne State University and the Detroit Medical Center, said the brains of preschool-age children in particular are undergoing striking changes in areas related to decision-making, arousal and response to stimuli.

"It’s an optimal time for hard-wiring positive, strong, good behaviors," he said.

Teachers conduct two lessons a week, each typically lasting 10 to 15 minutes. There are 46 lessons in all. Educators reinforce and model the behaviors shown in the lesson throughout the rest of the day. They then draw on the lessons as needed to address whatever problems might arise in their classroom, such as a dispute between two children who don't want to share a toy.

Sharing is an important but surely less-weighty topic than some of the others covered in the 23-week curriculum: violence at home, alcohol and drugs, child sexual abuse.

Teachers are specially trained to help strengthen children's ability to face, address and bounce back from troubling experiences. Each lesson is designed to help kids develop and nurture resilience-related skills when it comes to social competence, problem-solving, autonomy and a sense of purpose and future.

Rosenberg said scientists have theorized that resiliency originates from a mix of not only environmental and biological factors, but can also be genetic. During a trip to a Romanian orphanage in the 1990s, he met a boy who had endured horrific abuse and neglect but was a chess whiz and a leader among other children at the facility.

Resiliency — which Rosenberg defines as a person's ability to face both normally stressful and excessively stressful situations and still maintain one's true sense of being without being permanently scarred — can be learned.

For the lesson on being annoyed, Emard and a teacher assistant acted out a scenario relatable to any child — being teased by a peer.

"Good morning!" Emard said, using the Al puppet, which has a yellow skin tone and blue hair.

"Al, your shoe's untied," the assistant replied, her hand operating the Keisha puppet.

"No they're not!" Al responded.

After more taunting from Keisha, Al said, "Stop it. Teasing each other isn't any fun. It annoys me, and I don't like to feel annoyed."

Keisha replied: "OK, Al, I'm sorry. I was acting silly. I don't like to feel annoyed, either."

When the puppets were finished, Emard put them away as the students sang a good-bye song to them.

"He was getting annoyed and frustrated, wasn't he? He had a lot of emotion, didn't he? Do you ever feel annoyed? Give me a thumb's up if you've ever been annoyed," she said. Almost every thumb in the room shot up.

Emard discussed examples of feeling annoyed and asked the children to offer suggestions for how to positively deal with them. It's OK for people to feel annoyed, she stressed.

One child said feeling annoyed makes her feel like she wants to explode, and another equated feeling annoyed with her face turning red — the perfect cues for the baking soda and red vinegar demonstration.

Geller oversaw the creation of Al's Pals in the early 1990s while working at an institute within the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. She and her colleagues received federal funding funneled through the state to build a program around substance abuse and violence prevention for young children. They initially aimed to create a teacher development program, but saw a need for a developmentally appropriate and interactive approach that would impact kids directly.

While developing the pilot, Geller and her colleagues interviewed teachers and principals who told unsettling stories about their work with high-risk children.

"We’re talking about 3- or 4-year-olds who were asking for cocaine for Christmas, or bringing a hypodermic needle to school for show and tell. We still hear these stories," Geller said. "That's what kids do at a young age: They internalize whatever they're surrounded by."

Geller added: "We are not judging families. We are trying to provide families with every support that they need. People want good things for their kids."

She said the program is in some very affluent areas, as well as in rural and urban areas.

"We’ve worked with some Indian tribes and places that have large Hispanic populations. ... The puppets cut across those cultures," Geller said.

Emard said the 21 4- and 5-year-olds in her year-round Head Start classroom in a former elementary school relate to and respect Al.

"I like to talk to him. He's nice," Alina Dehuelbes, 5, one of Emard's students, said following the Al's Pals lesson about feeling annoyed. When it was time for Emard to put the Al and Keisha puppets away, Alina smiled sweetly and waved at them.

Each Al's Pals classroom has an "Al's Place" —  a safe zone where a child can go to be alone and collect his or her thoughts.

In Emard's classroom, Al's Place is in a corner behind a short bookshelf. There's a blue, egg-shaped swivel chair that comes with an accordion-style curtain kids can pull down for privacy. An image of Al smiles down from a small poster, urging children to Be safe, Be kind and Be healthy. Another poster lists problem-solving steps: 1) Stop. Think about the problem. 2) Say how you feel. 3) Brainstorm ideas. 4) Try the best one. 5) What happened?

"We ordered from IKEA an egg chair for every single classroom, so if they transfer, they always know where the clam-down place is," said Deb Hill, education manager of Capital Area Community Services Inc., a Head Start and Early Head Start provider that serves 1,500 Head Start children in four Michigan counties: Ingham, Eaton, Clinton and Shiawassee.

The agency has used Al's Pals ever since the mid-1990s, when about a half dozen of its classrooms participated in the pilot program.

It also offers classes related to a companion program for parents twice a year. The program touches on topics such as setting household rules (with the input of their children) and dealing with emotions in a healthy way.

"Our overall goal is to give them tools to be able to feel comfortable in different areas working with their children and realizing they truly are the first teachers of their children," said Sharon Rogers, community resource manager for Capital Area Community Services Inc. "We kind of do it as a whole family working together kind of thing."

Emard says Al's Pals lessons stick. She said she's heard children who are quarreling on the playground repeat the "Stop! Think!" mantra that's part of the program's approach to problem solving.

"Preschoolers have a lot of strong emotions, and they don't know how to deal with them," she said. "A lot of them are tactile and they want to use their hands. We try to teach them how to use their words.

"We're showing them at a young age how we can talk back and forth and resolve things. Before Al's Pals, you would see a lot of kids using their hands and pushing. They don't know how to get the words out.

"But if we help them get the words out, they feel safer to be in our classroom."

Each teacher who will use the Al's Pals curriculum must undergo 14 hours of training before starting. Wingspan, the company that produces the series, also offers refresher courses.

"We train the teachers on how do they listen, how do they validate what's going on in a child's life, how do they guide a child through a problematic situation," Geller said.

Hill said Al's Pals provides lessons that children can draw on for the rest of their lives.

"The hope is that they internalize everything," she said, "and then they can use it in any setting, with anybody."

Contact Ann Zaniewski: 313-222-6594 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter: @AnnZaniewski. 

About Al's Pals

The impetus for the creation of Al’s Pals came from early childhood teachers and administrators in Virginia who were seeking help to work more effectively with their young students, many of whom were living in impoverished, high-risk environments, where they were routinely exposed to substance abuse and violence. A look at the program:

• The flagship curriculum is Al's Pals: Kids Making Healthy Choices, a program designed to build resiliency in children.

• There are also three other programs: Al's Caring Pals: A Social Skills Toolkit for Home Child Care Providers; a program for parents called Here, Now and Down the Road ... Tips for Loving Parents; and Healthy Al, Healthy Me, a program aimed at combating childhood obesity.

• The flagship curriculum is now in 38 states, Canada and Bermuda, its lessons reaching children in day care centers, public and private schools, community centers and Head Start classrooms, which receive federal government funding to serve low-income families.

• Sue Geller, Al's Pals creator, and two colleagues wrote a 2004 journal article about a controlled study of the Lansing program. The article says children who participated in the program received lower teacher-reported problematic behavior scores for things such as self-centered/explosiveness, not paying attention, being antisocial or aggressive and social withdrawal and anxiety when compared with a control group.

• The National Center on Quality Teaching and Learning reviewed and rated Al's Pals: Kids Making Healthy Choices in a 2015 report, giving it the highest possible rating for its effects on child outcomes. The report is a guide to help Head Start providers pick a curriculum.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Our children: Puppet pals teach children resiliency, social skills