The late summer 2020 group, Giddy-Up, Whoa! is for first time children and adolescent or those who have completed a prior course of individual sessions and are now ready to join a group setting. This group will focus on increasing self-awareness and teaching participants a range of self-regulation skills. The group will be held on four consecutive Tuesdays (July 21-August 11) from 9:00 A.M. – 11:00 A.M. for 8-12 year olds and 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM for 13-17 year olds.
Registration Deadline is May 22, 2018!
Group Description
Through equine-assisted and nature-based activities, children in this group will explore and practice how to identify their current feelings, name the degree to which they are experiencing those feelings through a descriptive likert scale, and tools for increasing or decreasing those feelings based on the demands of the environment and as a way to manage stress.
For example, a child may process a situation like this:
“I am feeling excited. My level of excitement is a 7 which is fine for the playground but I am about to leave the playground and go back to the classroom. I need to bring my excitement down to a 3 in the classroom so that I do not get into trouble. How do I do that?”
In Giddy Up, Whoa! children will learn a range of skills to answer that question including body scanning, breathing, grounding, mindfulness meditation, visualization, setting boundaries and self-talk.
At the end of the group children will be encouraged to determine which skills work best for them and to use those skills to build a daily practice of stress reduction in order to decrease their stress baseline (which is elevated in children with trauma) and to increase their overall range of distress tolerance.
Children will leave with a written plan for their daily practice and with a set of skills for self-regulation. Parents, foster care providers, counselors and classroom teachers will be informed about what the child has learned so that they can continue to cue and reinforce the new skills.