This is the 10th year the St. Paul, Minnesota-based Climb Theater has brought its interactive drama lessons to schools in the Omaha-Council Bluffs area.
Actor-Educator Austin Sargent says they use character-building scenes and games to teach social issues to students in preschool through 12th grade. They’ve been at two elementary schools in the Lewis Central School District in Council Bluffs this week– E.A. Kreft and Titan Hills, where Sargent says preschool students have been working on taking turns and sharing and the K-6 students on resiliency.
He says Climb Theater has been around for 25 years and has scripts for a wide variety of issues, but they’ll also write new ones if a school’s need requires it.
“We do everything from the respect and empathy kind of basics right into like college preparedness and job training and harassment prevention. When schools contact us with their issue, it gives us an opportunity to write a script for them and then to say to other schools, we have this new script and we can show up at your school and do this.”
Sargent says Climb Theater always leaves the teachers with follow-up suggestions for ways to reinforce their drama lessons.
For more information, the website is Climb.org