Southeast students’ art enhances play therapy room

By Charles Oliver
Dalton Daily Citizen

December 19, 2007 11:13 pm

— Young children often don’t find it comfortable to just sit down and talk with a therapist, says Phyllis Spahn, a counselor with the Christian Counseling Center of Dalton.
“But they will express their emotions and feelings through play,” she said.
Play therapy uses games, puppetry, art and toys to help young children work through anxiety, grief or mental or emotional trauma.
The counselors at the Christian Counseling Center have been doing play therapy with children for many years.
But they believed that having a special area, designed for children, would make it even more effective. So they converted a large storage area into a therapy room. Then they started looking for someone to provide appropriate art for the room.
“We saw an article in The Daily Citizen on some art students at Southeast High School who had painted some murals at Westside Middle. That’s where we got the idea. They did such nice work there. We thought maybe they could help us with this room,” Spahn said.
Officials with the counseling center contacted art teacher Melodie Vaden.
“In multiple ways, my whole class worked on this, about 25 kids,” Vaden said.
“During the design phase, we worked on it for a week. The actual work was spread over a period of time. We were working on two projects. This took a total of maybe four weeks,” she said.
The design the students came up, in consultation with Spahn, called for several paintings representing various emotions to hang on the walls. The paintings are shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces to show how all of the emotions fit together in one person.
“We wanted to communicate how we all feel these feelings,” Vaden said.
She said the students were excited not just by the work itself but by the purpose it would serve.
“The whole idea was to get them in a team where ‘You do what you do best. And I do what I do best,’” she said.
Josh Foster, a sophomore, drew the faces for the paintings.
He saw the room for the first time on Wednesday. He said it turned out just the way he hoped.
“I like it,” he said.
“We’ve still got a few things to do,” Vaden said, including a mobile that will hang in the room.
But center counselors have already been using the room for the past few weeks, and Spahn said she can see a difference when working with children in the room. She said that play comes more easily to them because of the efforts of the students.

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