A Play for children from JC Sulzenko

What my grandma means to say, JC’s one-act play, gives elementary school-aged children and their families the chance to learn in a gentle way about how Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias can affect a person and what they can do to support someone living such a disease.

The setting provided by the play encourages children to ask questions in a safe-feeling environment, removed from the emotion that attaches when such an illness affects someone close to them.

The play can be performed by students for students or read aloud by a teacher or a volunteer. It kick-starts a discussion, moderated by a teacher or community member, who uses the questions and answers in The Discussion Guide, which was written and designed to complement the play. The Guide also includes the script of the play and sources of further information and suggests activities tied to the curriculum and to family experience to help build awareness and understanding of such diseases. A downloadable pdf. of the updated guide will be available in late spring, 2012.

When schools present the play as a ‘one-time’ event, JC would like to know that it is being performed and requests that the play to be performed as the script is written and her be authorship acknowledged publicly. When organizations such as non-for-profit or charitable organizations wish to use the play in their educational programming,  they enter into a simple written agreement with JC that gives them permission to use the material.  A modest honorarium seals that agreement. There is no set amount for the honorarium which is related to the organization’s ability to pay and to the project’s budget and scope.

JC is available to present the play to young audiences and to adults to encourage dialogue on a health challenge facing many Canadian families. The Alzheimer Society of Ottawa and Renfrew County , the Alzheimer Society of Prince Edward County and the Alzheimer Society Thunder Bay have built the play into their youth education programming.

A storybook adaptation of the play was published in the Spring of 2011, and  a pilot performance of the play is now available on YouTube.