Colors of Life Journal

Our main objective is to create hands on, easy to use material for social and emotional learning in schools. Many children carry social and emotional load which is not favorable for their learning nor their overall wellbeing. Some of the challenges they face that will influence their academic advancement and happiness are: social inequality, bullying, family conflict, academic stress, technology addiction, social isolation and loneliness. Social and emotional learning that endows them with tools and strategies to harness self-understanding, self-regulation and self-management has proven to improve their relationships, decision making, attention and focus allowing them to thrive in their inner and outer world. Using emotional journaling we hope to make this change happen. Through colors and emotional journaling. The needs we aim at with our Erasmus+ project: 1. Reduce emotional distress and improve emotional agility in children 2. For each child to find their own tools for their self-regulation of emotions 3. Abilities to self-regulate emotions will create a better social environment and empathy.

We wanted to achieve our objective by introducing easy workable material to children, educators and parents. Our material is developed to consist of three parts: 1. The “Colors of Life Journal” for children to handwrite about their emotions through thoroughly developed exercises and activities based on colors. 2. The “Wrapped in Colors Meditation Story Book” based on COLORS and EMOTIONS for children, offering mindful meditative stories, activities, food recipes, affirmations, exercise, use nature etc. 3. “Emotional Colorful Folder” for teachers and parents on how to use our above material with the children. Our “Colors of Life Journal” project will provide children with knowledge and tools to acquire emotional skills, to build resilience and self-regulation that will enable them to face adversity with ease and growth mindset. The better they know themselves the better they will be able to respond to the world around them. The target audience was three-fold; we are looking to engage children/students as well as teachers/educators and parents.

The activities in our project started with online and physical meetings with teachers and educators in the participating schools. After the books were delivered to the students we started with the workshops aimed at each participating class as follows: 1. During the project we have held 12 workshops, 2 in each of the 6 participating classes, in the Danish participating school, see photos attached. 2. During the project we have held a total of 9 workshops in the 2 participating Spanish schools. Representatives from The University of Valencia have participated in several of these workshops, see photos attached. Apart from the above, we also had continuous online contact with schools and teachers. Moreover we also implemented activities with writing articles and papers and activities as the following: 6. In July we hosted a class about Social Emotional Learning and our project for teachers and other educators on the Spanish platform https://elparquedelasemociones.com 7. In October 2023 we will give a 1 day workshop for foster families and their foster children at Danish municipality. We had ongoing meetings with the University of Valencia.

Short conclusion in the 23 pages final evaluation carried out by the Institute of Creativity and Educational Innovations, Universitat de València: The application of the “Colors of Life” program in the experimental group shows an improvement in the students' development of the intrapersonal dimension, referring to the capacity for self-expression and emotional recognition; the adaptability dimension, understood as the ability to manage changes in emotions and the total emotional intelligence dimension, compared to the control group. Furthermore, the interpersonal dimension, that is, the ability to have positive social relationships, shows an improvement in the group where the program has been worked on, compared to the control group. The same occurs in the dimension of stress management, where there are no changes in the experimental group, between the two moments evaluated (pretest and posttest), while in the control group we observe a decrease, which indicates that the program provides tools for coping with stressful situations that preadolescents face. Finally, in the general mood dimension, no changes were observed between the experimental group and the control group.