Puppets and the special needs child – possibilities and potential

In my diploma paper I present the use of puppets in counseling children with special needs. In the theoretical part I present puppet therapy, which is also used successfully in the field of education of people with intellectual disabilities. Given the individual characteristics of children with special learning needs and in accordance with the guidelines of contemporary cultural arts education, which dictates crosscuricularity, the puppet is a recommended teaching tool because it affects the full development of individuals and facilitates lifelong learning. This means that a puppet becomes our assistant in order to encourage child’s physical and mental ability regardless of the child’s disability, it being a Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorders or subtelomeric chromosome deletions. The second part presents children with intellectual disabilities who attend special education programmes. I describe each student from various aspects of his or her inherent characteristics of the development before entering puppets into his or her world and plan short-term and achievable goals for my advisory work and individual sessions, with puppets. I describe the process of choosing and making puppets in form of a log, and add comments on the effects on development in each area of functioning of each of the observed children. The practical use showed that we can successfully include Puppets into a group therapy as well as in an individual therapy for children with special needs. Progress in different development areas of a girl with Down syndrome, a boy with autistic spectrum disorder and a girl with subtelomeric cromosome deletion was noticed after using Puppets as a teaching tool