Teaching social skills to children through puppetry (Case study of Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, Fouman, Iran, 2014)

No one can deny the influence of a good show particularly a puppet show on children. When a word, advice, or recommendation is expressed indirectly by a puppet, children accept it better. With a strong sense of responsibility, sagacious educators seek more successful effective pedagogical methods for these children. Such training would create the conditions to have children having understanding, knowledge and confidence. The purpose of this study is to teach social skills to children through puppet show. This is an experimental study using a pretest-posttest with control group and regarding the goal is an applied study. The participants of this study include female members (young and adult) of Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, Fouman branch. To confirm or reject the hypotheses, the collected data were analyzed by the analysis of covariance through SPSS software. The results of this study revealed that the mean scores of the experimental group show a significant difference before and after the treatment. Having interviewed the participants’ parents, the findings of the research were also confirmed. Training social skills including self-awareness, communication, interpersonal relationships, companionship and empathy to children through puppet show were also confirmed in this study.