This resource has been designed to support practitioners and parents with practical and creative ideas on how to use illustrated storybooks therapeutically with children. Whilst this book is also ...available to purchase as part of a set, with three therapeutic fairy tales, all the content, worksheets and activities can be used with any illustrated story. Exercises have been created to encourage imagination and free play, develop confidence and emotional literacy as well as deepen engagement and understanding of stories. It is a book that can be returned to again and again to inspire creative engagement with stories with individuals or groups.
Key features include:
An exploration of the importance of stories to modern life, and their use as a creative and therapeutic tool
Guidance for working with stories and their illustrations, including conversation starters, prompts and worksheets for process-orientated creative activities
Accompanying online activities designed for specific use with the storybooks in the Therapeutic Fairy Tales series
This is an invaluable resource for all professionals looking to work therapeutically with stories and images. It will be particularly valuable to those working in child and family mental and emotional health, social and youth care, community and participatory arts, school and education, and specialised health and hospital environments.
The right conditions needed for therapeutic and creative storytelling are the same for any therapeutic activity; the creation of a sense of safety, an open attitude, authenticity, warmth, trust, ...holding/containment, stillness, receptivity, an ability to listen, and balancing a mental and emotional freedom with a sense of boundaries. The act of therapeutic storytelling, a potentially close encounter, may activate specific feelings. The child may transfer feelings from their own past experiences, either at home or at school, on the current situation. In psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy, transferring the past onto the present are described in terms such as transference and countertransference, and are seen as primarily unconscious processes. A key benefit of working with storybooks therapeutically is to provide an opportunity to explore their relevance to the child’s inner world. Metaphor creates its own world within a story, outside of the rational and the logical. Rather like the dreams, metaphor responds well to its own language.
Working with story Jones, Pia; Pimenta, Sarah
Storybook Manual,
2021, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
This chapter outlines a variety of prompts to help children engage and reflect on themes when working with storybooks. Given the wide range of conversation starters, it would certainly be ...counterproductive and intrusive to use them all. Any therapeutic interventions — questions, suggestions, observations, role-play activities, creative exercises — need to be selected and rotated in different ways that feel natural in the room. In reading and discussing storybooks in reflective ways, children are invited to connect with and express feelings around their own story. In this way, the storybooks can serve as tools for psychological release, understanding and growth.
This manual is designed to support practitioners with practical and creative ideas on how to use illustrated storybooks — both story and image — when working with children therapeutically. The ...manual, after a brief historical context of oral storytelling, myth, fairy tales and metaphor, and therapeutic stories, discusses the following: creation of right conditions for working with storybooks therapeutically and creatively; prompts and conversation starters on how to read and explore storybooks with children; and further creative ideas and exercises on how to use story and image as a therapeutic tool. The manual includes worksheets with examples of process-orientated creative activities. It introduces new skills based on blending creative and therapeutic fields.
Working with storybooks therapeutically draws upon some of the innate power of the bedtime story ritual, and the familiarity most children will have with books and stories in some form or another. ...Like bedtime reading, it can be useful to think about creating a kind of theatre and performance, a special space. A natural extension to working with storybooks is to encourage visual imagination and creative art-making with children. Art-making and play form the basis of children’s early years education as a tool to learn and engage with the world around them. Through art-making, children can start to make sense of feelings and difficult experiences, as well as invent new stories and realities. Not only can storybooks be used to explore both specific and existential themes in the life of a child, but equally they can lead to conversations about the therapy itself, exploring some of the more subtle aspects of the relationship between storyteller and child.
Oral storytelling forms part of our collective human history. Like breathing, it appears that it’s how we are made, with an innate need to share stories between families, peers and our wider ...communities. Perhaps quite simply, story creates a thread for us to hang feelings and experiences, bringing a sense of order and meaning to life events. In times past, storytelling often took part as a ritual, in a circle around a fire, a table, or in a special open-air place, like an amphitheatre. A designated storyteller would bring to life stories be it through their voice, physical actions, singing, music, masks and/or instruments such as a drum. Like language itself, over time stories shift and change shape. Myths, fairy and folk tales have been written down, turned into poems, plays, scripts, song. Printing presses and illustration techniques have brought us beautiful picture books, tangible objects to hold, look at and share.
Summary and conclusions Jones, Pia; Pimenta, Sarah
Storybook Manual,
2021, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
This book provides a practical source of ideas when supporting children going through loss and difficult life transitions. In providing a wide range of therapeutic and creative interventions, ...practitioners can pick and choose depending on what works for them and their clients. One of the gifts of children’s storybooks is their dual presentation of words and pictures, enabling the non-verbal and verbal to live side by side. This enables right and left-brain activity to happen naturally as children make their own links through the medium of metaphor. A storybook’s phrase can be a starting point to find words for feelings. Being able to reflect verbally can be enormously helpful, as children try to process what is going on inside them, around them. Education in schools has its natural focus on literacy, in teaching children to read and write. Although life inevitably brings change and hardship to us all, some children have difficult childhoods that leave them with fewer inner resources.
As well as prompting conversations, working therapeutically with storybooks provides other creative opportunities to support children. A natural extension to exploring story metaphors is to invite ...children to respond by inventing their own. Bringing inner worlds to life through visual imagination, play and creative art-making can be an empowering experience for children. This chapter explains a few basic principles in order to help move a child into the role of ‘art-maker/creator/author. Practitioners are aiming to build a safe space for natural creativity and art-making to emerge. The chapter provides a list of creative activities to help work with images around storybooks, starting with warm-ups, before leading on to other more story-related exercises. It lists a range of prompts and creative exercises to expand and open further opportunities with children to explore specific themes around storybooks. Art activities allow children to be free in their expression and to draw inspiration from their own worlds and those they find in storybooks.
The natural history of skeletal complications in achondroplasia (ACH) is well-described. However, it remains unclear how the rates of non-skeletal complications, surgical procedures, healthcare needs ...and mortality differ between individuals with ACH and the general population. This study aimed to contextualise the extent of these outcomes by comparing event rates across the lifespan, between those with ACH and matched controls in a United Kingdom (UK) population.
This retrospective, matched cohort study used data from national UK databases: the Clinical Practice Research Database (CPRD) GOLD from primary care, the secondary care Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) databases and the Office of National Statistics mortality records. ACH cases were identified using disorder-specific Read Codes or International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision codes. For each ACH case, up to four age- and sex-matched controls (defined as those without evidence of skeletal/growth disorders) were included. Event rates per 100 person-years were calculated for a pre-defined set of complications (informed by reviews of existing ACH literature and discussion with clinical authors), healthcare visits and mortality. Rate ratios (RRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were used to compare case and control cohorts.
541 ACH cases and 2052 controls were identified for the CPRD cohort; of these, 275 cases and 1064 matched controls had linkage to HES data. Approximately twice as many non-skeletal complications were reported among individuals with ACH versus controls (RR 95% CI 1.80 1.59-2.03). Among ACH cases, a U-shaped distribution of complications was observed across age groups, whereby the highest complication rates occurred at < 11 and > 60 years of age. Individuals with ACH had greater needs for medication, GP referrals to specialist care, medical imaging, surgical procedures and healthcare visits versus controls, as well as a mortality rate of almost twice as high.
Patients with ACH experience high rates of a range of both skeletal and non-skeletal complications across their lifespan. To manage these complications, individuals with ACH have significantly increased healthcare needs compared to the general population. These results underscore the need for more coordinated and multidisciplinary management of people with ACH to improve health outcomes across the lifespan.
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To investigate the association between maternal anemia and low/insufficient birth weight.
A prospective cohort study of pregnant women who underwent prenatal care at the healthcare units in a ...municipality of northeast Brazil together with their newborn infants was carried out. The pregnant women were classified as having anemia when the hemoglobin level was below 11 g/dl. Infants who were born full term weighing less than 2500 grams were classified as low birth weight, and those weighing between 2500 and 2999 grams were classified as insufficient weight. The occurrence of maternal anemia and its association with birth weight was verified using crude and adjusted Relative Risk (RR) estimates with their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (95%CIs).
The final sample was comprised of 622 women. Maternal anemia was considered a risk factor for low/insufficient birth weight, after adjusting the effect measurement for maternal age, family income, urinary infection, parity, alcoholic beverage consumption during pregnancy and gestational body mass index: RRadjusted = 1.38 95% CI: 1.07 to 1.77.
Maternal anemia was associated with low/insufficient birth weight, representing a risk factor for the gestational outcomes studied.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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