Alfie and Lilly

This week we would like to introduce to you Alfie and Lilly.

Alfie and Lilly are the two characters that identify Reach, we have been so fortunate to be able to work with such amazing, talented people to help us to bring Alfie and Lilly to life. We both had ideas of how we wanted Alfie and Lilly to look and to help us to start the process of creating Alfie and Lilly, Ursula Hurst who is a truly talented illustrator helped to design and make them ‘real’ and we just love them, we hope you do too. We wanted to further develop the characters Alfie and Lilly as they represent Reach, so we devised a plan …….

Once we had the illustrations, we asked the extremely talented Sue Mulkern to make Alfie and Lilly into puppets for us so we can use them within our work. During every step of the process Sue has sent us photographs of Alfie and Lilly ‘growing’ and ‘coming to life’ and we want to share them with you. The attention to detail she has put into them is simply amazing.

Alfie and Lilly will be used within the work that we do with the children that we are so lucky to work with, it is a great way of allowing children to experience the feelings of others and to learn important social and emotional behaviours. Puppets help children to identify emotions in themselves and in others, it is a great way of allowing children to explore the emotions they feel and then to teach them how they can deal with these emotions. The children we work with are encouraged to communicate through the puppet their own emotions and in turn as we work with the child we can model, explain and role play appropriate responses.

We use puppets within our work with all the children we work with (even the older children love them).

We will be introducing Alfie and Lilly to all our schools over the next couple of weeks so you can all meet them both in real life!! And if you are lucky enough to be attending our conference you will also get the opportunity to meet them there too.