Welcome to the Sunshine Creation Shop – where learning meets healing, and every moment is an opportunity for growth.

Our journey began with a music therapist working in a high school for troubled adolescents, where she noticed a sizable lack of tools and resources available to support students’ mental health and emotional growth. She began cultivating her own social emotional learning resources to support students in their journeys towards self-awareness, self-confidence, and overall self-mastery. Through the course of the schoolyear – and through the use of various social emotional learning and creative arts therapies tools, school staff watched the students slowly begin to come out of their shells, as they began to understand the importance of recognizing and regulating their feelings, as well as understanding their traumas, for growth and healing.

We began integrating simple, daily mindfulness, meditation, and gratitude exercises into our students’ class time and immediately noticed a marked change in the students’ demeanors; in their abilities to handle daily stressors and to approach life with greater confidence. Through the increased integration of social emotional learning practices into students’ daily and weekly routines – simple activities such as journaling, breathing and grounding techniques, self-care discussion, and creative arts therapies interventions – we observed positive growth in the students’ propensities for self-awareness and self-regulation.

As our rapport with students grew, we also began delving into deeper emotional explorations with our student groups – using SEL techniques such as feelings worksheets, body scans, lyric analysist, and self check-ins – and found students’ abilities to identify, express, and regulate emotions, as well as their abilities to form deepened connections with their peers and other staff, increased tremendously. These students who had entered their school year feeling isolated, depressed, with lifetimes of unprocessed trauma and abuse, began to open up about their feelings, to understand more about their traumas, and – most importantly – to feel excited about their futures.