I used to have one board for all therapeutic intervention ideas, but I have since organized them into various boards. You can see all of them at pinterest.com/carlycollins
Anyway...
Speaking of Pinterest, that's where the idea came from that I'm sharing today: I saw an idea for teaching children vocabulary words, and I modified it for feelings and coping strategies (adapted from this original idea from Juggling With Kids Blog.
I called my version the Feelings and Coping Parking Lot.
 |
| Feelings Parking Lot. Photo Credit: Carly Collins |
Materials needed:
Poster board (or tape 4 pieces of paper together)
Markers
Toy cars
Here's what you do:
-If you have it, a piece of poster board would probably work best (I only had lined paper taped together, you have to be flexible and creative as a field-based clinician!)
-Create 'parking spots' large enough for toy cars to fit in by drawing them on the board
-Have the child identify various difficult emotions they experience and write them in parking spaces on one side of the 'parking lot'
-write various coping strategies you would like to teach the child or review with the child in the other parking spaces on the opposite side
-give the child a scenario that they must identify an emotion. For example, "How would you feel if someone broke your favorite toy?"
-ask the child to "park" their car in the feeling they would experience (drawing feeling faces along with the words can help with smaller children)
-if you want, you can use this time to discuss this feeling, have them make a face to show the feeling, etc
-next have the child take that same car, or another car if you have more than one, and ask them to choose a coping skill they would use to manage that feeling, or one they would like to learn, and park their car there
-once they choose one by parking, practice that coping strategy
-continue until all emotions and skills have been identified
My kiddos love this activity, and it's a creative way to practice identifying emotions and coping skills!
I'd love to hear if you try this and how it goes!
*apologies for any typos or weird words, I typed this using my phone and hopefully caught all of the autocorrects! ;)
