When we started Tilli, we thought about all the events in one's life. The good and the not-so-good events. All the events had a thing in common - EMOTIONS!
But then why do we say being emotional is a bad thing? When did we stop talking about how we felt? Well, let's not do that, and especially with our kiddos!
A peaceful space: MIND GARDEN
Even kids need some alone time, going to their backyard garden in real life or visiting one in Tilli. A place away from adults so think about their day and take care of the flowers, giving them a sense of responsibility and maturity.
Hello friendly flowers!
These flowers are cute, friendly and also talkative! They love to hear how the day went. They also have feelings, just like anyone in the world.
To increase the bond between the flowers and kids, we introduced the gameplay of taking care of the friendly flowers. There are 3 ways to take care of them:
Giving them fertilizer
Showing some water
And talking to them, obviously.
Talking about talking time :)
Talking about emotions can be very emotional and chaotic. A skill called Self-Awareness needs to be developed to have constructive and less chaotic conversations about emotions.
To build that, we have divided the talking time into 3 quick sections for a child to understand:
Which emotion are you feeling right now? - Giving the child limited but diverse options gives them the opportunity to reflect and yet not confine themselves to happy or sad emotions.
2. How big is your emotion? - Emotions are not set on one intensity, a child should start getting familiar with that. This will help them understand that two people can have the same emotion but yet can have different intensity. Making a 5 year old understand what ‘intensity’ means is a challenge. We explored terms and behaviors kids use to express intensity, and size came as a clear indicator. The child must choose between two sizes of the selected emotion. This will make them conscious about how ‘big’ they are feeling.
3. Finally, let's talk! - Before talking about the emotion, the child must be able to select the emotion and its size, becoming self-aware. Now they are ready to think about WHY they might have felt that way. We do not force the child to talk about the reason, keeping it open will allow the child to explore if they really want to share the reason. If not they can just talk about their day. The point is to create a habit of thinking about emotions.
Bonus! - ABCDE Strategies
Okay so the child felt an intense emotion, now what? Let’s see if we can manage that intensity.
Managing is not a bad thing. It is a skill that helps one regulate their emotions and let them out appropriately.
Milo, our helpful cat, wants to help with that skill. He has a bag full of activities (or strategies, as we like to call it)!
The child rates the strategies after completing them, this allows us to personalize recommendations when they feel something intense. These strategies will only be shown to the child when / if they select the big emotion size, teaching them that not all emotion intensities need to be managed.
When to play?
Emotions do not come on a scheduled time, so we also do not restrict the times one can play or visit the Mind Garden.
But we do recommend doing 1 visit each day, for yourself and the flowers.
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