On the occasion of World Mental Health Day, Silver Oak Health, Bangalore had organized a semi-interactive session, ‘Get Crafty’, on October 6, 2021. The session was facilitated by Subikshadeepa Natarajan, a psychological counsellor at Silver Oak Health. The speaker has degrees in psychology from PSG College of Arts & Science, Coimbatore, and Christ University, Bangalore. While the session was designed for children, all employees could also participate. The objectives of this semi-interactive webinar were to help children focus on personal development, understand and develop a unique growth pattern in them, and help build strength and resilience.
The facilitator initiated the session by introducing the participants to an activity called The Tree of Strength. Subikshadeepa first explained that participants should have paper, colour pencils, glue ready for the activity. For the ease of understanding in this virtual platform, a video showing the steps of the activity was also displayed on the screen.
The speaker started the activity by asking the young participants to draw a tree on a sheet of paper by tracing their palms. In the second part of the activity, the participants were asked to either cut out shapes of leaves, fruits, and flowers from colour paper or draw them on the tree. Also, the speaker asked them to draw roots at the bottom part of the tree, stating it to be the most important of any tree. Here, the lines traced from the fingers represented the branches of the tree. Moving ahead, the speaker asked to designate the leaves with strengths and skills, the fruits with goals and dreams, the flowers with achievements, and the roots with support systems of the participants.
The main agenda of this activity was to help participants not only acknowledge their strengths, goals, achievements, and support systems but also to visualize them. The continuous suggestions and queries showed that the participants were very keen on getting the most out of the activity. As the session was coming to an end, the responses like ‘When is the next session?’ which indicated that the attendees enjoyed it to the fullest and were left wanting for more.