Sometimes people interpret feelings very differently. For example, is the stone “purposeful” or “bossy” or…? You decide! 52 full-colour cards laminated, full-colour cards, 150 x 100mm, 2-part cardboard box, 44 page booklet.
Describing feelings is at the heart of emotional literacy and therapeutic work. Meet 52 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. On the back of each card are three possible words to help build a vocabulary for describing the emotion expressed.
In staff supervision
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, St Luke’s Anglicare
Stones hit their mark A review 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.
