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Stones ...have feelings too! |
| The Strengths Cafe is an online publishing project sponsored by Innovative Resources.
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Meet a pile of quirky, engaging, happy, sad, afraid, shy, joyful and just plain outrageous 'stone' characters-characters who wear their feelings all over their not-so-stony faces.
Counsellors, teachers, therapists, social workers and anyone who works with others will find that this set of 52 full-colour cards and booklet is a wonderful tool for talking about, and reflecting upon, feelings.
On the back of each card there are three possible 'feeling' words that can be used to help build a vocabulary for naming feelings as well as enabling conversations about how feelings are interpreted.
Illustrator, Ray Bowler, has breathed life into these rollicking stone characters and proved what every child who has ever carried a stone around in their pocket knows. stones have feelings too! |
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In the Mailbag
Recently I discovered that the Stones...have feelings too! cards are an excellent resource in supervision with staff.
They were really useful in helping a worker to articulate how she was feeling about her planning, goal setting and current work with a family. She then selected the stones she wanted to relate to and the feelings associated with these cards.
This opened up a new conversation about the worker's current strengths and ways that she can use them to enable a shift towards the 'preferred stones'. This flowed on to what the worker decided she could do to enable this to occur and new plans for the family intervention and her overall practice.
It was a real 'ping' moment!
Thanks for this excellent resource. I know that in supervision I will be attempting to integrate the tools more regularly.
Denis Byrne, Children & Family Services St Luke's Anglicare |
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Bringing Stones to Life 'There seems to be a great thirst amongst human service workers for materials that unlock the complexities of different feelings.' In December 1995 Innovative Resources published The Bear Family as a 'family sculpting tool' to assist clients of family workers to talk about their experiences of 'family'. As with many of our other publications it wasn't long before the original intent of the cards was outstripped by numerous other creative applications.
The Bears After the initial print run The Bear Family became simply The Bears and while still regarded as an invaluable tool in family therapy, they quickly developed multi-faceted applications across many different professions. We heard stories of their use in classrooms, staff meetings, professional development seminars, prisons, parenting courses and in many different forms of counselling. They have also been used as an evaluation tool and in the training of child protection workers.
The magic of The Bears is that they simply represent feelings. These cards provide a means for people to communicate how they feel without the need for words. This ability to represent even deep or hidden feelings in a way that others can understand gives The Bears a potency that is uncluttered by the struggles we experience at times to find the right words to express ourselves. For this reason children and adults alike find The Bears profoundly effective in ensuring that their feelings are heard.
Exploring feelings and personalities With the popularity of The Bears came requests for more tools that explore feelings, body language and personalities. There appears to be a great thirst amongst human service workers for materials that unlock the complexities of different feeling states.
Our search for another original 'window' into feelings proceeded slowly. In part this was because we anticipated that someone else would surely pick up on the idea, particularly since concepts of 'emotional intelligence' and 'emotional literacy' had become so prominent.
However, it was not until we saw the illustrations that Ray Bowler had created for our picture book, The Wrong Stone, that we recognised that here was the basis for a completely new resource for talking about feelings. The Wrong Stone is a simple tale that celebrates difference and highlights the increasing need for processes of inclusion in our society. It is a story about hope, optimism and social justice that challenges common notions of giftedness, elitism and 'colonising' practices.
Stones ...have feelings too! Ray Bowler's delightful illustrations depict stones with very recognisable human characteristics.and foibles. It was Ray's injection of an array of subtle personalities into the 'ragtag razzamadazzle' of our stone pile that suggested a very different way of portraying feelings.
Yes, bears have a great way of demonstrating human emotions. But as we've since discovered, stones ...have feelings too! |
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The Stones Cards in ReviewStones Hit Their Mark By Anne McCrea and Lyn Browne Hunter Child Protection & Family Counselling, Newcastle, NSW
Stones ...have feelings too! is a deck of fifty-two colourful laminated cards. Each card features a stone cartoon character representing an emotion. On the reverse side of each card are three suggested emotions the stone might depict. There are no words on the front of the card, so the user can interpret the picture freely. Stones comes with a booklet of suggested uses, which encourages flexible and creative thinking rather than prescriptive use. The cards can be used to explore individual feelings, mapping of family feelings, family 'sculpture' work, or to explore group developmental stages.
Initially, we had some concern that many of the illustrations seem obscure. Part of the problem is that the facial expressions, postures, gestures, and setting of the stones are sometimes ambiguous. But the ambiguity of the cards turned out to be their strength, because the children could use them to describe idiosyncratic or ambivalent feelings. It also helps the counsellor avoid assumptions and prescriptions.
Children may describe many cards as 'happy' or 'sad' because they focus on the perceptible smile or frown on the stone. Also, some symbolic thinking is required to understand, for example, that a stone with a hole in it suggests feeling 'hollow', 'empty', or 'drained'. However, in our individual work with children, we found they readily made their own interpretation of the cards. They enjoyed the activity and described the cards as: 'cute', 'fun', 'a funny puzzle', 'hard [to work out] but fun', 'really cool', and 'something different'.
We used the cards to good effect in a domestic violence group for children 7-11 years of age. Each child was asked to choose a card that represented their feelings about the group closing, and then to describe their feelings. The cards suited the various personalities in the group, and the children freely expressed what they saw in the cards and were not distracted by the words on the back.
Stones may be more appealing to men and boys because they are not as 'cute' as The Bears. They might also be better suited to upper primary children, adolescents, and adults; clients who have a reasonable vocabulary of feelings and some abstract thinking ability.
St Luke's have taken the concept a step further by producing a set of stone figures. A Pocket of Stones is a set of twelve hand-crafted, ceramic heads, each one with a different shape and a different facial expression. This adds a three-dimensional tactile element that appeals to children and adults alike. |
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Using the Stones Cards: some expert tips
Stones ...have feelings too!
There is a great thirst amongst professionals such as counsellors, teachers, therapists and social worker for materials that enable us to express our feelings. Being able to communicate feelings, and also 'reframe' them is at the heart of emotional literacy. Within a couple of months of publication we discovered that our picture book The Wrong Stone had become a minor cult classic thanks to the delightful stone characters created by our graphic artist, Ray Bonner.
The 'ragtag razzamadazzle' of the different personalities in Ray's stone pile led us to think that here was a way to cater for other tools to replicate the success of The Bears in portraying feelings. So the Stones were born-52 quirky stones with individual personalities that depict a broad range of emotions.
In fact, the Stones use body language and facial expressions to represent feelings in a way that is highly interpretable. Different people will read different interpretations of the same stones card-which is what happens in real life. Our own feelings, thoughts, and experiences mean that we all interpret situations differently and we have different vocabularies for languaging feelings. For this reason the stone characters have no words that accompany the 'portraits', but on the back of each card are three possible interpretations offered as suggestions only. Sometimes the words are very similar in meaning and sometimes they are quite different. For example, is the stone 'purposeful' or 'bossy'? You can decide!
Stones ...have feelings too! can be used (with or without referring to the words on the back) as useful ways of building emotional intelligence and emotional literacy. They can also be used in similar ways to The Bears and the more recent Koala Company. All these products portray feelings but, as different visual metaphors, their appeal and their meaning will vary from person to person. The suggested uses and activities associated with each of the card sets are interchangeable and the tools used can be matched to the preferences of workers and clients.
Before Using the Cards-Some Cautionary Questions
The following questions may be useful to consider before deciding to introduce Stones ...have feelings too!
Used carefully and respectfully, the cards may generate lots of questions and emotions. As a powerful conversational prompt, they can assist conversations to evolve in different, even unexpected ways.
Unpacking the Baggage 'This is a useful exercise for demonstrating that we approach all situations with a residue of feelings from previous events.' Here is an icebreaker exercise with both a light-hearted and a serious intent that has many applications in classrooms, interviews, meetings, workshops and therapy sessions.
Participants working in small groups of between three and six are asked to choose the 'stone' that best represents how they were feeling coming to the workshop or group session:
This is a useful exercise for demonstrating that we approach all situations with a residue of feelings from previous events. We never start as blank slates. Recognising this and allowing for it to be processed can play an important part in opening ourselves up to new learning and giving ourselves permission to move on.
Storytelling and Imagination 'The conscious construction of characters, choice of how these characters communicate and the ability to differentiate between feeling states can all lead to us assume more control over the feelings that shape the way we view the world.' As well as working as prompts for conversations, the cards in this set can also work as prompts for imagination; especially in relation to storytelling. There is no scripted storyline for any of the stones characters. Instead, their openness to interpretation can act as a catalyst for building vivid and unique stories.
The stones cards can be used as a prompt for creative writing:
Or alternatively,
Another option as a pathway into creative writing or storytelling is to read a short account of an event such as an encounter between people. This could be a short story, poetry or a newspaper article or a photograph. Participants could choose or be given a Stones ...have feelings too! card and asked to re-write the story as seen through the eyes of the 'stone' character.
A number of Innovative Resources' publications have also been used to stimulate creative expression in drama classes. Stones ...have feelings too! could certainly be used in this way:
Narrative work has created many rich and interesting connections between storytelling and creation of identity; building optimism and healing. The conscious construction of characters, choice of how these characters communicate and the ability to differentiate between feeling states can all lead to us assume more control over the feelings that shape the way we view the world. |
