Books, puppets, and sharing: Teaching preschool children to share

This quasi-experimental study examined the change in a specific behavior in preschoolers, that of sharing, after treatment with bibliotherapy combined with puppetry. The study took place in a small preschool in southern Illinois and utilized six 3- to 5-year-olds as the subjects. The subjects were preobserved to obtain a frequency count of the number of times sharing occurred in a 10-minute period. Each child was observed for 10 minutes daily for one week. After preobservations were completed, the subjects received daily 30-minute treatments of bibliotherapy and puppetry for one week. These treatments entailed the reading of books to the subjects by the teacher/researcher. The books were selected because they had themes relevant to the topic of sharing. This was followed by the presentation of puppets by the teacher/researcher to role model the characters in the books. Afterwards, the children used the puppets to portray the characters in the books. Following the treatment period the subjects were postobserved using the same methods and procedures as in the preobservations. The results found that combined bibliotherapy and puppetry helped increase sharing behavior in preschoolers.