Emily Wicks with UConn’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry noticed the pandemic-era disruptions to kids’ social-emotional learning and development, and reached out to Sandy Chafouleas at the university’s Neag School of Education. Together they developed Feel Your Best Self, a puppet-centered program aimed at helping “strengthen the emotional well-being of elementary-aged children.”

The five-minute video Denoya’s students watch is part of a series produced through a new pilot program called Feel Your Best Self, or FYBS. Each video is built around a simple strategy to help kids recognize and manage their feelings – or to help friends who are struggling.

“It’s taking what we know works,” says Emily Iovino, a trained school psychologist who is part of the FYBS team.

In this forum, Feel Your Best Self creators Sandy Chafouleas and Emily Wicks and script writers Yanniv Frank, Emily Iovino, and Sarah Nolen talk about the development of this unique interdisciplinary collaboration between UConn’s Collaboratory on School and Child Health and Ballard Institute to use puppetry to promote emotional well-being in elementary-aged children.

Chafouleas and her colleagues developed their Feel Your Best Self program to help children aged 3-12 years improve ways of relating to others as they return to the classroom post-pandemic. The program represents a partnership between Chafouleas’ group, the Collaboratory on School and Child Health, and the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, the world’s only graduate program in puppetry, both at the University of Connecticut.

Interdisciplinary collaboration between the Neag School and Ballard Institute goes high tech with the help of the UConn Tech Park, to the benefit of children across the state.

Interdisciplinary collaboration between the Neag School, co-created by Sandra Chafouleas, and Ballard Institute goes high tech with the help of the UConn Tech Park, to the benefit of children across the state.

Interdisciplinary collaboration between the Neag School and Ballard Institute goes high tech with the help of the UConn Tech Park, to the benefit of children across the state.

This week, Eyewitness News is getting advice on how to help students who are going to school for the first time or moving from one school to another. Tuesday we’re focusing on helping kids transition from elementary to middle school. It can be challenging. It’s not just the next grade. It’s a new building, a new time of day, a different routine with more freedom, and more responsibilities.

Enduring the turmoil of a global pandemic for more than two years now, many of us have struggled. We can recognize the importance of self-care and wellness, but not everyone has necessarily adopted a daily meditation practice or quit their late-night doomscrolling. By now, though, perhaps we can admit to ourselves one thing: It’s OK to not be OK in every moment.

“School assignments that a student is expected to do outside of the regular school day—that’s homework,” says Sandra Chafouleas, a UConn Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the Neag School of Education. “The general guideline is 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level beginning after kindergarten. This amounts to just a few minutes for younger elementary students to up to 2 hours for high school students.”