Do you have a grieving child in your life? Are you a caring adult wanting to help? Are you looking for healing activities and the language to use to explain them? Bundled together, KID TALK and OUR STORY give you over 100 creative activities and games, including the memory book, lesson plans, supplementary materials, and additional resources. Used in public schools and hospice settings over 20 years, the curriculum was recently expanded to be faith-based for use in a church setting with the goal of helping a child know God better and trust Him more. The format and content are proven successful. With KID TALK and OUR STORY, you can create interactive sessions with confidence that you are using time-tested exercises that work for the setting and profile of your child or children. Directions explain each activity with kid-friendly words. You will be able to help a child (or children) better understand and process his or her grief, diminish fear of grief itself, and normalize the grieving process. You will have multiple ways for the child to express his or her love for the decedent: memorialize. The pages in Our Story can inspire family conversations and doing griefwork together. The memory book can be a healing tool for the child to return to when his or her grief recycles in adolescence. Two books for the price of one. Purchase of the book entitles you to 25 exclusive downloadable PDFs at www.kidtalkgrief.com. These books are what you need to meet a grieving child's need for comfort, understanding and support.

Based on Alan Wolfelt's six needs of mourning and written to pair with Companioning the Grieving Child, this thorough guide provides hundreds of hands-on activities tailored for grieving children in three age groups: preschool, elementary, and teens. Through the use of readings, games, discussion questions, and arts and crafts, caregivers can help grieving young people acknowledge the reality of the death, embrace the pain of the loss, remember the person who died, develop a new self-identity, search for meaning, and accept support. Sample activities include grief sock puppets, expression bead bracelets, the nurturing game, and writing an autobiographical poem. Activities are presented in an easy-to-follow format, and each has a goal, an objective, a sequential description of the activity, and a list of needed materials.

Based on Alan Wolfelt’s six needs of mourning and written to pair with Companioning the Grieving Child, this thorough guide provides hundreds of hands-on activities tailored for grieving children in three age groups: preschool, elementary, and teens. Through the use of readings, games, discussion questions, and arts and crafts, caregivers can help grieving young people acknowledge the reality of the death, embrace the pain of the loss, remember the person who died, develop a new self-identity, search for meaning, and accept support. Sample activities include grief sock puppets, expression bead bracelets, the nurturing game, and writing an autobiographical poem. Activities are presented in an easy-to-follow format, and each has a goal, an objective, a sequential description of the activity, and a list of needed materials.

Whether it's a fish, a friend, or a family member, nearly every child will experience a loss in their early years, and the experience and feelings of a sad event can be confusing and scary. And when grief intrudes, children look to their parents and the adults in their lives to fix this pain, take away what they don’t understand, and show them how to handle their emotions. Parenting a Grieving Child provides practical and approachable resources for Catholic parents and other adult helpers who work with children to use the power and traditions of the Catholic faith to accompany children as they work through their grief in a healthy way. As author Mary DeTurris Poust points out, too often children are left out of the grieving process and their specific grief issues are not addressed, or are addressed in harmful ways. Children’s grief is real and powerful, and it needs to be acknowledged and validated by the adults who are accompanying them through the grieving process. Drawing from the traditions and practices of the Catholic faith, Parenting a Grieving Child provides the steps parents can take to help their child through one of life’s most difficult experiences.

One out of seven children will lose a parent before they are 20. The statistics are sobering, but they are also a call for preparedness. However, pastors and counselors of all types are often at a loss when dealing with a grieving child. Talking to adults about death and grief is difficult; it's all the more challenging to talk to children and teens. The stakes are high: grieving children are high-risk for substance abuse, promiscuity, depression, isolation, and suicide. Yet, despite this, most of these kids grow up to be normal or exceptional adults. But their chance to become healthy adults increases with the support of a loving community. Supporting grieving children requires intentionality, open communication, and patience. Rather than avoid all conversations on death or pretend like it never happened, normalizing grief and offering support requires us to be in-tune with kids through dialogue as they grapple with questions of “how” and “why.” When listening to children in grief, we often have to embrace the mystery, offer love and compassion, and stick with the basics. The author says, "We don’t have to answer the why and how for them, but we can assure our children that God is with us as we suffer. We can do so by doing good for others and pointing out all of those moments when someone has done something good for us. I believe that most of the time that’s as far as we will get, and that is okay."

Do you want to help a grieving child? OUR STORY: A MEMORY BOOK for _____ is 38 pages of exercises designed to enable a child to navigate their grief, tell their story, and better understand and express their grief. It is an interactive tool you can use to help a child learn, heal, and grow. As you do griefwork together, you are building a healing relationship that moves the child through the grieving process. Each page can become a springboard for conversation, promoting griefwork as a family around topics like 'Favorite Things,' 'An Acrostic for ____,' 'Toilet Bowl Love,' and 'Treasured Memories.' Pages like 'My Silent Hurting Heart,' 'My Grief Bundle,' 'The Behaviors of Grief,' and 'How My Family Has Changed' increase understanding of the grief experience. Detailed instructions for each page of OUR STORY are found in Kid Talk A FAITH-BASED CURRICULUM FOR GRIEVING CHILDREN. For this reason, the two companion books are printed as one. Kid friendly language you can quote introduces over 60 more games and activities in the Kid Talk curriculum. They tip the balance of griefwork towards 'fun.' (Examples are popping corn without a lid when talking about anger, making 'pop-up puppets' who talk for you, the 'feelings vase magic,' blowing 'love bubbles,' and 'Kid Talk Jenga.' With a completed OUR STORY memory book, a child no longer needs to worry about forgetting the person who died. The memory book can also be an invaluable support when grief recycles in later years. And it will, especially in adolescence. It will enable the child to do griefwork in the future by reconnecting with once-fresh feelings, memories, and perspective of their loss. It will continue to inspire healing conversations with family that are mutually beneficial griefwork. Griefwork heals. For your convenience, the OUR STORY MEMORY BOOK can also be purchased separately if you are working with more than one child.

Discusses how children grieve and presents ways of dealing with the grieving child in the schools.