Create tissue-box monsters to munch away your worries!
What you’ll need: An empty tissue box (or more than one if you want to make a family of monsters!), paints or coloured pieces of paper to cover the box, paper, coloured pens or pencils.
What’s it for?
Feed your worries to the monster! This activity helps you realise what is worrying you, and serves as a metaphor about removing worries from your mind.
Check In:
Notice how you’re feeling right now. Close your eyes and notice what’s going on inside your mind and body.
How are you feeling?
What are you thinking?
How does your body feel?
Method:
Take an empty tissue box and completely paint the outside in a monstrous colour of your choice. If you don’t have paints at home, use coloured paper to cover the box leaving the hole free (from where you remove the tissues)
On a separate piece of white paper or card draw and cut out the monsters googly eyes to stick on to the top of the box.
Draw and cut out on white paper or card some jaggedy monster teeth, stick these to the top and bottom of the tissue box hole (the hole will be the monster’s mouth!)
If you’d like to add some other features like some evil ears, or a nasty nose, then do that now.
When your monster is complete, think about what’s worrying you at the moment, write these on small slips of paper.
With a supportive person, go through the worries one-by-one. Try to figure out what is in your control to change and how you might do that, and see which worries are out of your control and therefore not worth worrying about!
Now the fun part! Fold the slips of paper with your worries on and feed them to your Monster Muncher! How does it feel to get rid of the worries? Let the monsters handle them so that you can get on with your life!
Extra Activity: You can feed more worries to your monster at any time! If you have a brother or sister who is worried about something, would you be able to help them with their worries by helping them work out what they could do, or what is out of their control?
When you’ve finished, spend a moment reflecting on the activity and ask yourself the following questions:
Did you learn anything new about yourself while you did this activity?
How did it feel to feed your worries to the monster?
When you completed the activity, how did you feel?
Conclusion:
This activity helps you to think about and deal with your worries. Often, our worries seem much bigger and more unmanageable to us than they actually are. This activity helps us to sort them and put them in perspective.
Take a moment to notice how you are feeling at the end of this activity. Did you discover anything surprising? What can you take away to make you feel better about yourself from this activity?
If you would like to, share something about your experience with this activity with someone you live with! Ask the person who looks after you to send us an email if you have any questions or comments about the activity, or would like to send us any pictures (info@catcorner.co.uk). Don't forget to subscribe for more fun CAT activities!
Created by Ian Grundy © February 2021
Creative Arts Used: Art
Psychological Areas Explored: Anxiety, Emotional Wellbeing, Resilience, Relationships
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These activities could be done by children of all ages, but some may need the support of their parent or carer to read the instructions or complete the activity safely.
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