Lotus Book Usage for Emotionally/Behaviorally Disturbed Students
The construction of the lotus book utilizes origami folding and decorative choices for design of the cover, and beads or a pendant can be chosen for the ribbon binding. All these features can serve as expressions of the student. The pages of the book when opened to the fullest extent, are each divided into four squares. The content incorporated into this book by a student with emotional/behavioral disorder can utilize these pages in a variety of ways. The page divisions can serve to catalog the thoughts and experiences of the student. The emotions that challenge the student’s self management skills can each be given a dedicated page. The featured emotion can be given one of the four squares where the student can create an image, poem, list of descriptive words, relevant quotes or whatever the student feels is the most effective method of illustrating the strength and depth of that particular emotion. The other three boxes of the page can be used to hold content related to other aspects of the challenge relevant to particular emotions. One box may be used to list circumstances causing rise in emotion. Another box may tell of experiences of unmanageable feelings in contrast to a box on the opposite side of a fold that tell stories of times the student felt successful at stress management. With creative, innovative lesson planning, this type of activity can be done with a class as a whole to promote social adjustment and inter-student understanding. The result then is every student creating a journal in which to reflect on life, revisit and analyze their experiences.
The intended benefits for the student come from the process as a whole and with a content focus on self understanding, self management techniques that work, critical thinking, and experience and evidence of success.