express yourself

The therapy area at Operation Breakthrough is now lined with a wall of expressions. I wrote about this brainchild of play therapist Ann Thomas once before on the blog, but now I can show you what the final installation looks like. Ann’s idea (yes, this is the Ann who is going with us to Uganda!) was to provide the young ones with visual cues that would help them articulate and show their feelings. She selected several from the many photographs I have made at Operation Breakthrough over the years that she felt really zeroed in specific emotions. Once they were printed and framed, she found Dave Walker who could (graphically and artistically) spell out those feelings. She added mirrors (all of this is at kid level, of course) so the children can practice expressing an emotion, seeing what it looks like on their own faces and comparing it to that which is conveyed in the photograph. It’s such a great idea, and Ann reports that it has been working extremely well. I couldn’t get a good shot of the entire hallway, but here is a little piece of it.