Ashley Cirone, TREE resource coach, is sitting cross-legged amid a circle of third-graders at Pescadero Elementary. The children listen with rapt attention as Ashley relates a Hawaiian fable about a girl named Leola. Leola was born with a light inside her, Ashley tells them, lighting a tea candle in a beautiful bowl in the center of the sand tray in front of her. The children eagerly repeat the story’s refrain, “And her light shone bright.” Then the story takes a turn, as Leola’s light begins to grow obscured with feelings of frustration, sadness, anger. With a collective gasp, the children watch as a pile of stones accumulates over the candle in the bowl.
Kandi Robertson, TREE mental health therapist, working with a group of California students during our recent visit.
Members of the TREE team are in California as part of a mutually enriching collaboration with the La Honda Pescadero Unified School District (LHPUSD), a rural area less than an hour south of San Francisco, and Bayshore Elementary School, serving a small urban community nestled in Bay Area sprawl. Last June, teachers and administrators from LHPUSD and Bayshore came to CCLC for a week of TREE professional development funded through a grant from the state of California. Training continued in the three small CA schools during the first week of October, with several demonstrations of moving stories, a method combining story, sand tray, and play therapy, developed by TREE mental health therapist Dr. Sue Carroll Duffy to facilitate social and emotional learning.
“What happened to Leola? What do you think might have made Leola feel so hurt and angry?” Ashley asks the class. In shy, barely audible voices that slowly gain strength, the students offer ideas that clearly come from their own experience: “When people tease you.” “If you did something bad on accident and people start to avoid you and you get lonely.” “When you’re stressed.”
The children’s eyes are wide as Ashley continues the story. Luckily for Leola, her Grandma remembered her light, which had been there all along. “Turn the bowl over,” she said to Leola. So she did, and the stones fell away. Again, “her light shone bright.” The children sigh with relief. Ashley invites them to go back to their desks, where paper and watercolor paints are waiting. “Think about a time when your own light shone bright,” she says. “What was that like? Can you paint it?”
“This is great,” says one little boy, enthusiastically turning his paper into a turquoise-blue ocean, where he swims with a pair of dolphins.