POWER Tools
Last week at spring break camp, your child helped to create a personalized POWER toolbox. Perhaps they tried to explain what the various objects are and what purpose they serve as a tool for their body and brain. Some items are self-explanatory, but others might have you puzzled. We wanted to follow up to explain the benefits and purpose of the toolbox.
On day one of camp, campers began to learn about four important colors from The Zones of Regulation that represent emotions and behaviors. The colors are Blue (sad, tired, bored, sick, low energy), Green (calm, listening, ready to learn, happy, regulated), Yellow (silly, frustrated, nervous, little out of control) and Red (mad, hitting, screaming, out of control). These four color zones are considered ok, accepted, and normal to feel throughout the day. What matters is how we manage the emotions and behaviors that correspond with Blue, Yellow and Red. When
these zones emerge, we need to rely on our POWER tools. These tools help the body and brain return or approximate the green zone, which is the optimal zone for learning, relating, and having fun. Since each camper’s needs are different, there are many options to explore that might be effective in helping your camper self-regulate. This is the goal of a POWER tool.
Tools for the Hands:
Playdough – Manipulating and playing with this tool can help with attention, reduce fidgeting or wiggling, or ease anxiety through its potential “heavy work.” Heavy work involves pushing, pulling, stretching or moving objects with resistance or weight. It is about getting active with resistive activities like swimming and hanging on monkey bars. Campers can work out frustration or uncomfortable feelings by manipulating a material that is resistive yet pliable by squeezing, pounding, and molding. Pliable textures such as playdough, clay, and putty develop the small muscles of the hands. By placing small items (i.e., beads, pennies, marbles) inside
playdough or putty to hide or remove also develops fine motor and visual skills.
Gel fidget & Mesh and Marble fidget – These tools are fun to move the gems/marble and to squeeze. Hand fidgets can help a child manage anxiety, improve their attention or ability to focus. It can even help them calm down when feeling a surge of emotions that are associated with the yellow and red zones.
Packing Bubble Strip – These strips can be great fun to squeeze and pop. The sound and the fine motor skill that it takes to achieve this goal is a great distraction when feeling anxious or bored. It can also help to “wake up” our brain since it takes some focus. Additional cognitive challenges include add colors/numbers on the bubbles in a random display for the child to scan, call out several colors/numbers to target their working memory, or use it as a spelling practice tool.
Bead Counter – This tool can be used for multiple games that can help to focus the brain and regulate the body. For the brain, campers use it as a counting tool for Math or to play games in the car (i.e. slide and count the bikes that you see on an errand or on a family trip), make patterns with the multi-colored beads, or use it as a task organizer for homework or chores (i.e. put on 4 beads to represent 4 tasks and after they complete a task they remove one bead paired with a big hug). The bead counter can serve as a quiet fidget since you can roll, spin, and play with the beads secured on the chenille stick. This tool can also be used as a visual support
for deep breathing as you slide a bead from one end to the other while taking in a long deep breath! You can even blow the next bead across the table before sliding it onto the stick to emphasize a long slow exhale which activates our relaxation state!
Tools for the Mouth:
Pretzels & Fruit snacks – Food is not only delicious, but can serve as a regulating tool. Crunchy food can “wake up” a child’s brain & body through the repetitive munching and from the sounds that crunchy food creates. Fruit snacks and other gummy like snacks require more chewing and additional jaw work which reduce excess energy. Bagels are a great snack for calming input since it provides “heavy work” for the mouth. Chewing can also help a child focus and act as a filter to reduce stress. Lollipop –Lollipops can provide calming input via the deep pressure input that is produced as a child sucks on the candy. Sucking can also activate eye muscles to effectively converge for reading, copying at near point, and completing a worksheet. Lollipops can also be alerting if a child chews and munches on the hard candy. This may support a child who constantly chews on his/her clothing and/or pencils.
Pinwheel – This tool requires blowing to activate the spinner top. Blowing and breathing is considered the fastest way to regulate and change an arousal state. The added pleasure of watching the colors spin and seeing the light reflect on the pinwheel improves a child’s focus and organizes eyes for near point learning (e.g., reading, worksheets, math).
Tools for the Eyes:
Magnifying glass – This tool lets us focus, observe, and note things in our environment that can help us understand and learn. A magnifying glass is fun to see nature and objects up close in order to tune into the small details and to get a different perspective. At POWER Play Kids Camp, we teach a POWER skill referred to as Think with your Eyes that encourages campers to make observations, scan and search, think before asking or impulsively reacting, and to guide their problem-solving skills. A magnifying glass can represent this skill and be a prompt for effectively using the visual sense to improve our relationships, become more independent and to learn. Just as Thinking with Our Eyes helps us become a Social Detective, the magnifying glass can be used for reading … helping your child become a Word Detective! Magnifying the word parts as you say each sound adds a fun element to reading tricky words. You can also use the magnifying glass to look for items in a Hidden Picture, to find Waldo, or to notice differences between two similar images.
Eye Mask – Wearing eye masks can reduce the amount of visual stimulation which can sometimes overload our ability to cope with our surroundings. Headphones can serve this purpose for our auditory sense by reducing the volume and intensity of surrounding noises. For sensitive children, these tools can give a brain a break and calm a mood.
Additional Tools:
Lavender Spray – Essential oils, like lavender helps us relax. Spritz a few gentle squirts onto a pillow to improve naps and nighttime rest. Studies reveal that lavender oil can help you fall asleep and improves the overall quality of rest. Plus, it is just super fun to squirt and smell it in the air and on our bodies.
Tennis Ball – This tool can help reorganize and target distracted behavior through a toss and catch game. By rolling the ball on shoulders, backs, legs and arms for a massage can support relaxation and ease tension after a long virtual school day. It could also re-energize and help with focus. Squeezing the ball with the whole hand for quick bursts or for a sustained squeeze will strengthen hands and shoulder musculature.
Calming Sequence Handout – Campers practiced this sequence during a morning meeting. It is helpful to practice this sequence while in a calm regulated green zone. The repetition of performing the 3 movements– squeezing the hands, massaging the sides of the head (temples), and rubbing the legs can lead to a calmer state by releasing tension, anger, and frustration. We also added taking a deep breath before starting the next calming sequence.
Lazy 8 Handout – This handout demonstrates an exercise that involves tracing the shape of a figure eight while you breathe deeply. You can trace the Lazy 8 while breathing on the paper, in the air, or a desk/table, or on a hand. Deep breathing helps get more oxygen into our bloodstream, relaxes our muscles and returns our heart rate back to normal. It has a physical effect to help calm us down and lower stress. Breathing can also immediately avoid a reflex to “flight, fight or freeze” when we encounter a problem or have difficulty coping with demands.
Crafts – Campers enjoyed the spin art and returned to this station frequently to take another turn to create a magical picture. Crafts and other projects that involve hands and attention can lead to a just-right arousal state.