Creative Communication

I did a BILD course on creative communication last Monday. The media is itself very creative and we need to find lively ways for people to learn more about the media. The course gave us some great ideas for ways of communicating with people who use little or no speech, especially ideas about using music, dance and puppets.

People have different views to each other about using things with adults, like toys and puppets, which kids also use. My feeling is that we should always try to use the most adult thing but if that is something that kids also enjoy that’s no reason not to use it. To put that a bit more clearly (!), it seems fine to me to use stuff that kids also use as long as it is helpful to adults. The important thing is how can we best help people to make their views known to other people and how best can we help people to understand what we’re saying.

The puppet we were introduced had plenty of attitude! And not only arms, hands and a mouth that move, but even a tongue which can wiggle! We all certainly had a lot of fun with that. This puppet is from a website which also has lots of other fantastic puppets – www.puppetsbypost.com.

It was very interesting hearing about how puppets help people to express themselves, for example people with autism who can find it very difficult to talk directly to people.

We talked about puppets and cartoons being enjoyed by adults. One example of this is the Simpsons – www.thesimpsons.com

Another is Avenue Q which is a puppet musical on in the West End of London. It’s very much for adults, as some of it is about sex. The puppets are quite like those in Sesame Street, not the old fashioned sort with strings. http://www.avenueqthemusical.co.uk/

We’d welcome your views on using toys, puppets etc with adults.