to help children learn
lessons about tolerance
Puts on puppet show
to help children learn
lessons about tolerance
By linda denicola
Staff Writer
VERONICA YANKOWSKI Maribeth Rubin, 18, of Freehold Township, who is working toward her Girl Scouts of America Gold Award, performs a puppet show with a theme of tolerance for pupils at the Joseph J. Catena School, Burlington Road.
FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP — Maribeth Rubin, 18, is a senior at the High Tech-nology High School in Lincroft, but she has been a Girl Scout since she was in kindergarten in Freehold Township. She is working on her Gold Award for the Girl Scouts of America, the highest award a Girl Scout can achieve.
In order to achieve the Gold Award, Scouts have to complete a community service project that requires 50 hours of service work. Rubin’s project is a series of programs for elementary-age children on tolerance and diversity. The program consists of a puppet show assembly and follow-up activities.
She presented her first performance on Dec. 13 at the Joseph J. Catena School, Burlington Road, during a morning assembly. The room was filled with kindergarten through third-grade pupils sitting on the flour and listening intently while Rubin brought to life the duck puppets she had created and the simple town of Nesting Feathers.
The puppet show, based on an original screenplay, Make Way for Ducky, was designed to teach young children about diversity, tolerance, differences, stereotypes and equality. Rubin played all of the parts and fielded questions when the 20-minute play was over.
VERONICA YANKOWSKI Joseph J. Catena School pupil Amy Nibbs enjoys a puppet show presented by Girl Scout Maribeth Rubin, 18, of Freehold Township.
The play revolves around Ducky, who has lived in Nesting Feathers all of her life. An emu moves into town and starts school there. Her name is Ena Lane and she is different, with a long neck and curly hair. She is also Australian and speaks differently. A group of noisy classmates taunt her with the mocking cry, "Ena Lane has a neck like a cane! Ena Lane has a neck like a cane!"
Ducky has a bigger heart than her classmates and befriends Ena Lane. In the end, she says, "Ena and I may be different on the outside. We may look different and we may like different things, but we’re really both the same. We both have good hearts."
In addition to putting on the play, Rubin spent 15 minutes in each third-grade classroom doing activities that reinforce the lesson on diversity. In one activity, children were given lemons to peel to demonstrate that although each lemon had somewhat different characteristics on the outside, they were the same on the inside. Another activity was designed to demonstrate that sometimes it takes a whole group of people to do certain things. It was an experiment in cooperation.
It was obvious that Rubin’s heart was in the project. She put a lot of work into writing the script and making the sets and the foam board duck puppets decorated with hair and fur and colorful construction paper.
During the question part of the program, these very young children got right to the core of the presentation. When asked what the message was, one child said, "Have a good heart."
Another child asked Rubin, who recently received her acceptance letter from Brown University, Providence, R.I., and will be leaving for college in September, if she ever felt different. She said, "Yes, everyone feels different sometimes."