Sort and Soothe
Located in a small village in West Scotland named Lochwinnoch, Kibble Education Forest View Primary School and Kibble Education Secondary School are independent schools specifically for children affected by trauma and those with complex emotions and/or behaviours. 6 students from Forest View Primary School grouped together to form the team ‘Sort & Soothe.’ Their tool involved sorting the soothing images, and they created a questionnaire to assess how happy and relaxed those taking part were before and after using the tool. Although the team managed to design their tool, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, the team were unable to pilot and evaluate their tool.
View photos of Sort and SootheWhat were your aims for your wellbeing tool?
We hoped to create a tool which would help us to feel calmer when we were feeling stressed. We created a questionnaire that we think will let us find out if the tool helps other people. We hope to use it in the pilot stage when we have more of our school friends try out our tool. We found the tool helped us to calm down & feel relaxed, and we’re looking forward to seeing if it will help others too.
What ideas did you have?
When we first looked at the pictures that had been gathered by Project Soothe, we noticed patterns. We noticed that some pictures were of scenery, some were of people, some were of animals and so on. We liked sorting them into piles of different types of photos. We decided that this was a nice relaxing thing to do, so it could help us to relax and might help others to relax too! We picked the name ‘Sort & Soothe’ for our wellbeing tool. We designed our Sort & Soothe logo – we started with two different logos and had people pick their favourite one then selected the one with the most votes. Angela put it on the internet for us so people could see our logo and our wellbeing tool.
Can you tell us what obstacles you faced when designing your tool?
Of course! At first, we found it tricky to come up with an idea, we just really enjoyed sorting the pictures. Then we realised – that could be our tool! We found it really calming to sort them into different types of pictures and thought that maybe other people would find this relaxing too. That’s how we came up with our idea – Sort & Soothe.
How did you plan on piloting your tool and collecting data?
We planned to ask the other children in the school to use the wellbeing tool, completing the questionnaire before and after they had played Sort & Soothe. This will hopefully let us know if it helps them to feel calm and relaxed, like it did for us. We’re going to ask the different classes in our school and give them each a photo pack for them to use, then we’ll gather the questionnaires in and see what everyone thinks of Sort & Soothe. We hope it’ll help them to feel calmer and more relaxed, especially if they’re feeling a bit stressed.
We wanted to know if our tool would help other people near our age to feel calm and relaxed, so we decided to ask our friends in the other three classes to test our tool and see if it helped them. There are four classes in our school, so we could use our budget to buy four packs of 50 photos. When we were playing sort and soothe, 50 photos felt like the right amount.
Can you tell us about the final design you decided on?
We used photos that Angela brought in for us to look at, from the bank of Project Soothe images. We were thinking about how to design our tool when we realised how much we enjoyed sorting them, and how it helped us to feel calmer and more relaxed. We created a paper and pen questionnaire. We emailed them to the other classes teachers to print off, then they scanned them and sent them to us to be COVID-19 safe!
We planned to make a video to tell them how to use our tool. They can watch it, then fill in the prequestionnaire. Then they can play sort & soothe and fill in the post-questionnaire to tell us how they got on.
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Funding Support
We are grateful to have received funding from the following organisations.
