Addressing the Stressful Feelings
Week 5 of Connect: P.O.W.E.R
After a relaxing two weeks off (three for me, as I was sick for the last group), we resumed our POWER Group! To address the feelings of nervousness most of us get when going back to school and work, we talked about stress and anxiety this week. Although this topic was a bit heavier than our previous topics, we paired this topic with fun activites like home-made stress balls and collaborative art pieces!
To start off the group, Melissa and I gave a brief presentation explaining what stress and anxiety is and what it means. This is intended to get the girls feeling more familiar with these terms and how to recognize the signs if they begin to feel them. We also presented some awesome coping strategies for stress and anxiety such as emotion and solution focused strategies. When we wrapped up this presentation, we then played a game that asked questions about what coping strategies we use when we feel stressed or anxious about a variety of scenarios.
Following this discussion, we headed into our first activity of the evening, which was home-made stress balls! For this, each girl was given a balloon of their desired colour and some water beads. We then helped each girl insert the water beads into the balloons by putting them in a water bottle first, wrapping the opening of the balloon over the mouth of the bottle, then dumping the beads in. Once it was complete, the girls had a squishy new stress ball to take home and use whenever they feel nervous.
For our second and final activity, we did a collaborative art project! For this, each of us were given a small canvas and some markers. We set a timer for 2 minutes, and in this time, each person was to draw whatever they would like on the canvas. Once the time was up, we passed the canvas over to the girl on our left, and they continued drawing on the canvas. We did this for 2 full rotations until our canvas’s were complete! We all loved this activity, and each canvas turned out spectacular!
Even though we discussed some heavy topics this week, each girl seemed to have a lot of fun, which is what this group is all about.
January 3rd, 2024
-Jael, BigsNBC Volunteer