This 41-page volume offers hands-on, visual tools to help children learn about key cognitive-behavioral skills. These tools help children to identify stressors, understand emotions, and differentiate good stress from bad stress. Here's what's included:

IDENTIFYING STRESSORS • UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS

• Let’s Talk About Feelings: In this activity, children use a Feelings Word Finder and Here’s What Happened cards to differentiate and name a wide range of emotions. The Word Finder has words to describe 60 emotions; the cards describe situations involving children, teens and adults. With this activity, the child imagines how these people might feel.
• Feelings Check-Up: With these activities, the Feelings Word Finder is used (without cards) to help children identify and appropriately express their feelings about events that have occurred in their own lives.

DIFFERENTIATING FACTS FROM OPINIONS, BELIEFS, EMOTIONS

• Be a Feelings Detective: This activity helps children learn to distinguish between the “facts” of what happened and one’s consequent thoughts or beliefs. It sets the foundation for subsequent activities in which they will evaluate those thoughts and beliefs and determine which are helpful and which are not.

GOOD STRESS, BAD STRESS •    TOP FOUR STRESS BUSTERS

• The Stressometer: The Stressometer activity helps children think about the difference between healthy and unhealthy stress. First, the child identifies stressors (challenges, situations, circumstances, habits, relationships) in their lives. Using the stressometer as a visual guide, the child then assesses where each of the stressors fall on the healthy-unhealthy stress continuum.
• Top 4 Stress Busters: This is a follow-up to the Stressometer activity. It sets the stage for talking about four types CBT-based Coping Skills: response inhibition, cognitive flexibility, self-monitoring and problem-solving/planning. (These coping strategies are taught in the next Volume of this series: Stress-Busters: CBT-Based Coping Skills.
   

About the series (Cognitive-Behavioral Support for Young Hearts and Minds)
This series is not intended to provide in-depth training in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT); rather it is a guide for mental health clinicians already knowledgeable about CBT.  But even experienced CB therapists can find it challenging to use CBT with children. First, there is the challenge of explaining CBT concepts in ways that will engage young hearts and minds. Second, there is the challenge of effectively involving parents and teachers, in order to provide the support that the child will need to implement CB strategies at the “point of performance”–the specific situations of everyday life where they are having difficulty.

The three volumes in this series provides activities and visual tools that make CBT concepts more accessible for children and also helps the clinician to organize interventions within a comprehensive plan for a child that includes involvement of parents and teachers, enabling the clinician, the child and other significant adults to all be ”on the same page.” The three volues in the series are:

Volume #1 Let’s THINK About Feelings, Emotions, and Stress sets the foundation of self-awareness
Volume #2 Stress-Busters: CBT-Based Coping Skills provides a basic “tool kit” of coping strategies
Volume #3 The Think Book is a lap book that provides scaffolding for students as they put these strategies to use in their daily lives, with support  from parents and/or teachers.