Anna Parker

PORTFOLIO 

• Anna Parker is a Masters of Fine Arts candidate in Design and Technology at the Parsons School of Design at the New School. Anna is interested in pursuing a career in Graphic Design.
  
  Anna has a lifelong love of art and design as well as strong interest in digital photography, which led her to graduate Cum Laude with a Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design with a minor in Fine Arts from Cabrini College in Radnor, PA.
  
  In addition to her love of the field, her previous experience teaching at the Preschool, Pre-Kindergarten, and Kindergarten level has given her a passion for projects that give back to, and improve the lives of others.
  
  When not working, you will never find Anna without her sketch pad, digital camera, or both, taking pictures or sketching her bucolic Ringwood NJ lake community.

EmpaTheater

Grounded in the fundamentals of child development, and currently held educational best practices at the state, local, and teacher level, empatheater is a curriculum that is designed to strengthen preschool and pre-kindergarten students understanding of their own and others’ feelings. The affordable and easily implemented curriculum, taught over 4 lessons on a weekly or monthly basis, breaks down emotions into their physical, facial, and auditory components. These components are conveyed to the children through the use of interactive hand puppets and role-playing.

• • EmpaTheater addresses the concept of empathy by attempting to integrate the essential, diverse, psychological underpinnings of child development. EmpaTheater attempts to teach children to recognize emotions in themselves and in others, and to eventually regulate their responses to these emotions and to verbalize their emotions.

    EmpaTheater puppets, which serve as anthropomorphic surrogates for the child’s emotions, enable them to use their senses to manipulate the environment, observe how other children respond to their puppets actions, and allow them to form their own hypotheses about the emotions of their fellow students. This type of interaction is particularly applicable to the preschool aged child, as this form of creating imaginary situations and acting them out is already the dominant way in which they engage in play behavior.EmpaTheater utilizes a puppet theater, supported by 30-minute lesson plans, EmpaTheater teaches children ages 3 through 5 about empathy through learning about their emotions and how those emotions relate to themselves and others. EmpaTheater enables primary school children to begin understanding empathy and, in turn, how to understand and manage their emotions through daily or weekly lessons about specific emotional interactions.