Friends In Training Play Group: Social Skills for Children
Friends In Training (FIT) Play Groups were created by two sisters and their brother whose professional expertise led them to develop a social skills learning program to help socially delayed children. Linda Young, Shelley Frost and Patrick Cravalho use methods developed by Michelle Garcia Winner as well as their own uniquely designed activities that help children to succeed in the everyday world of human intereaction.
What makes the Friends Play Groups especially effective is the use of video. Throughout the course of each meeting, the children are filmed as they model their newly learned skills. At the end of each play group session, each child receives a DVD personalized to their experiences in the classroom. These DVD's are designed to help facilitate the child's learning and retention of their new social skills long after the play group is over.
Printed with permission by Gary Raucher, LMFT, RDT, California Institute of Integral Studies.
Playtime in Therapy Nets Serious Results by Gary Raucher, LMFT, RDT
While adults will generally accept imaginative play as a natural mode of learning and mental-emotional healing for children, they are less likely to appreciate the value of play for themselves. In actuality, entering into a play-state - the experiential and embodied use of imagination - can be extremely beneficial for mental-emotional health in people of all ages.
For example, recent research shows that therapies involving the experiential use of the imagination (for example, role-plays), where emotions are safely contained, are particularly effective in re-patterning the neurological impacts of trauma. Furthermore, a number of developmental studies show that there is a high correlation between a child's capacity to engage in imaginary role-play, and his or her ability to solve real-life relationship problems. For one thing, role-play requires a person to step into another's shoes, an essential step in learning empathy. Additionally, use of the imagination stimulates cognitive development and problem-solving abilities, just as thinking things through makes it easier to complete a contemplated task.
There's also the factor of embodiment: engaging one's body in imaginative play opens more neural pathways to desired emotional or behavioral changes than does talk alone.
Drama therapy, offered at BACF, is one approach that applies all the benefits of imaginative play to the healing and growth of clients of all ages.
(Gary Raucher, MFTI, RDT, is a Registered Drama Therapist who uses
elements of play and the expressive arts in his work with children,
adults, couples, families, and groups.)
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
We are delighted to announce that our Friends play groups are being facilitated by the San Carlos Children's Theater (SCCT). Please visit our current play groups page for more information and how to enroll your child.
