Supplemental Sunday: Update on the Box Idea

I am trying to figure out what to write about today. I haven't used my creativity to make anything this week, so there's nothing new to display. I improvised quite a bit this week, but like all of my improvised songs, the music is fleeting.

Oooh, I could update you on how the boxes are working in my sessions.

If you remember, I spent time at the beginning of this month talking about using color-coded boxes to help with group treatment. The boxes, in four different colors, contain emotion choices, emotion strips, and any other visual aids that I need during sessions. The idea is to give kids lots of choices for communicating their emotions and to help decrease the wasted time taken in passing one option around a group of 12 kids.

We started using them two weeks ago.

There are good things and bad things about the boxes.

First, kids are starting to get used to how to use them. Some of my students don't understand that they only need to finish one sentence and they complete all of the emotion strips. Others are still a bit resistant and will push the board/folder away. I will change how things are presented for those kids. The number of choices may be too much for them to sort through. Or, they just may not want to communicate with me. Either way, I will change procedures just a bit.

Second, most of my kids don't seem to care about the skin tone of the picture, but some do. One of my young men sorted all of the pictures by skin tone. He doesn't necessarily choose his emotion picture based on his own skin tone, so I know that he is looking at the emotion picture rather than just choosing something that looks like him. 

Third, the 3mm laminating film works fine on the folders, but it's a bit too flimsy for the emotion pictures. I may need to re-do things using a thicker laminating film to increase durability of the moveable pieces. Time to go back to Lamination Depot for some new film. Come to think of it, I have some samples in my sample box, so I can try out the thicker laminate to see if it will do what I want it to do.

The boxes are working. Most of what happens with these boxes are what I anticipated happening, but there are some differences. That's part of the journey of creation and discovery - finding out how clients like to use things is a big part of the fun.

This next week is our Musician of the Month reveal week, so I don't have anything to put into the box other than the emotion pictures. The week after that is firework improvisation week, so I'll find some pictures to go along with our improvisations. We're also going to do some firework countdowns, so number boards would be good to have in the boxes. Hmm. My creative spark is starting to light a fire. Color-coded number boards...I could do lots of different things with something like that...