Hey Forest Friends Families,
Today I’m emailing with a video of me showing my backyard and talking about the new plants I’ve planted. In this video, I talk about how spending time outside and the consistency of watering plants (or having a schedule in more kid-friendly language) have helped me cope with my feelings of sadness.
I created this video for a few different reasons:
- I wanted to normalize kids’ feelings in response to COVID by saying that I am also having difficult feelings.
- This is a strange and confusing time and our lives are quite different than they were before. I wanted to acknowledge this by talking about my own experience of this transition.
- I’m missing all of you and I wanted to share a bit of my life with the kids!
Follow-Up Activity: Make a Sadness (or other emotion) Plan
After watching the video, have a conversation about sadness, loneliness or another emotion your child often experiences or struggles with. Ask them, what are things that help you feel better when you’re sad (or lonely, etc)? You may need to help them find answers by pointing out activities or behaviors you’ve noticed them doing to help themselves self-regulate. Once you have a list of at least a few activities, you can add images next to each activity to help your child “read” their list. Then, when they feel this feeling again, you can look at this list together and your child can choose an activity.
*Note* – this plan is meant to be an aid that offers a variety of responses to a feeling rather than a solution. If you try this and your child does not want to do one of the activities in the plan in the moment, that’s ok! Sometimes we need to just feel our feelings, and you can always try again next time.
Sending you all well wishes,
Teacher Eliza
