RAINBOW TALES - Healing Audio Stories for Children by Susan Perrow
… like a rainbow in a storm, a healing tale can shine light and colour into the challenges of daily life …
Welcome to RAINBOW TALES, an APP that offers story medicine in audio and text as a creative strategy in parenting, teaching and counselling children.
RainbowTales.app is a therapeutic tool for parents, teachers and therapists to use in supporting healthy child development. The stories speak to a child’s imagination, offering ways to help, strengthen, motivate, sooth, and sometimes even transform challenging behaviour and challenging situations.
Children are born with a natural gift of imagination and a natural connection to story. Guiding and teaching them through story language helps children to have an emotionally balanced childhood. The stories, in a subtle and creative way, can help children build the resilience needed to meet life’s many challenges.
The APP is intended for children from the age of three to nine+
What is a Healing Story?
As medicine is used to help restore wholeness or balance to out-of-balance physical conditions, story medicine (therapeutic or healing stories) can be an imaginative and effective strategy for helping shift challenging out-of-balance behaviour or situations back towards wholeness or balance.
Therapeutic stories are an indirect (more subtle) means of addressing challenging and traumatic situations and topics. Working with a specific selection of metaphors chosen for the specific behaviour or situation, the story form offers a healing medium that allows the listener to embark on an imaginative journey, rather than being lectured or directly addressed about the issue. By identifying with the main character or characters, the child/teen/adult is empowered as obstacles are overcome and a resolution achieved.
The story may heal, help a little, help a lot, strengthen resolve, and/or sow invaluable seeds for future change.
RainbowTales.app can help children with:
Why is this APP so special?
- RainbowTales.app contains more than 100 therapeutic audio stories by Susan Perrow
- As well as the full text, each story has a summary and instructions for parents/teachers/therapists
- Each story is narrated by professional narrators
- Every story includes an original colour illustration, simply designed so your children have room to develop their own imaginative connection to the story journey
- No advertising or any inappropriate content
- The APP works with the screen turned off, so your children will be actively listening and not spending time in front of the screen
- correct diction
- concentration
- comprehension
- enriched vocabulary and communication skills
- development of imaginative thinking
Active Listening can help children with:
How to use this APP
RainbowTale.app will be rolled out in stages, with this, the first stage, spanning a collection of 101 stories divided into the following six colour coded sections for easy reference (note – the second stage promises a further 122 stories, and will grow in number year by year):
1. Stories for Challenging Behaviours (RED)
2. Stories for Challenging Situations (ORANGE)
3. Stories for Everyday Challenges / Routines (YELLOW)
4. Bedtime Stories (GREEN)
5. Environmental Stories (BLUE)
6. Resilience Tales (VIOLET)
Within the first three sections there are categories that cover many commonly identified challenging behaviours, from dishonesty to laziness to teasing and bullying and more, as well as including a range of stories for challenging situations, like ‘tidy-up time’, ‘moving house’, ‘separation anxiety’, ‘fear and nightmares’, ‘illness and grieving’. You will find category titles for easy reference, but it is certainly not recommended that they be used as ‘labels’ for behaviour.
In all six sections, every story is preceded with brief notes, including a synopsis and suggestions for ways to extend and use it, sometimes with craft and/or games and/or roleplay and questions.
Gendered pronouns and nouns can be changed to suit different individuals - this can be done by reading the text yourself and making the changes as you go.
Susan Perrow M.Ed
Susan Perrow is an Australian whose life passion is stories and storytelling. Susan is an author, therapeutic storyteller, teacher trainer, parent educator, a mother of three sons and a grandmother. For the last 35 years she has been writing and telling stories to groups of children and adults, and documenting stories from other cultures - all woven into her career in teaching, lecturing and consulting in Australia, Africa, Asia, China, Europe and North and South America. Susan has four published collections of her therapeutic stories, now translated into 12 languages. You can find more information about the author on her website SusanPerrow.com, and the publisher Hawthorn Press UK
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