Halverson is a professor with the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction. She developed this program to be a community building experience for elementary school classrooms using performing and creative arts.

Whoopensocker has typically been implemented as a residency type program in Madison schools. This last summer, Whoopensocker partnered with the Madison Public Library. Four workshops were hosted around Madison, two open to the public at the Pinney and Sequoya libraries, and two for targeted groups at the Hawthorne and Meadowridge libraries.

This program allows the kids to be the writers and creators of the show, and the summer workshops saw a variety of creative skits, about things like “a mysterious piece of burned toast, a strange purple dust that turned a whole town into zombies, dogs that do magic tricks, and a dairy cow that escaped a farm to open her own gourmet milk stand in the city.”

Whoopensocker encourages children to explore different ideas. Teaching artists make sure participants understand, support and respect, but also encourage, silliness.

The program also facilitates collaboration amongst the kids. They share ideas for components of the skits and set goals together for the direction of their projects. When they have time to write individually, they are able to take away inspiration from the ideas they’ve built on as a group.

The children eventually are able to share their work with the community. Teaching artists use the writer’s unique work and create an original production. Many Whoopensocker participants could be found at the productions at the library, proud to see their creativity shared with the community.

Read more about the summer Whoopensocker! program here.