PHOBOMOPO: The Next Incarnation
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My friend and colleague recently had a stroke. As you can see, she, on the left of the picture, is a young woman.  It has been a very challenging time for their family.  I met with them at the rehab hospital and we went through a few basic Brain Gym exercises they could add into the excellent professional therapy she was receiving.   We included Cross Crawls, Hook-Ups, and Lazy 8s. More on that later.

Melanie and I worked at Hearthstone School for many years, I as a K-12 educator and she as the activities coordinator. She was responsible for coordinating fun activities that were educational and I was called to design educational activities that were fun.

It was only as matter of time before we began to tangle our responsibilities and natural proclivities into co-created groups, classes and field trips that were favorites for many students and families.

One of my all time favorites was PHOBOMOPO. After surveying students on what kind of activities and groups they wanted to see offered (which were many and varied!), we came up with one that would incorporate and link together photography, books, movies and poetry. Hence, PHOBOMOPO (first few letters of each word). It was a hit.   

My favorite times in the class were playing with words and movement. We explored words and their relationships to and impact on each other...... and their combined impact on us.

We drew them out, tossed them about, introduced them to each other and moved them with our bodies.
We danced with them in our heads, as spoken language and written communication; sometimes they led, sometimes we did.

Since movement is so integral to brain health, I would formally like to change the MO in PHOBOMOPO from movies to movement, but I will have to check with Mel first! We can always go to the movies later.

Research shows that personal meaning and just the right amount of emotional attachment enhances learning.  An important aspect of traditional speech therapy is the practice of recapturing specific words that you have lost access to due to the stroke.  One important aspect of the alternate kind of exploration that I am describing here, is that there is not really one correct answer.  The flexible brain can find many associations and with discussion we can share our associations with others. 
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I have a feeling that in the courageousness journey of stroke recovery, this kind of entry into the world of words might be very beneficial. Word retrieval in an open ended format. A creative way to forge pathways in your brain that might be new and exciting.  

And since movement is so integral to brain health, I would like to change the MO in PHOBOMOPO from movies to movement.

In the school class we used a technique I learned from Susan Wooldridge, poet and author of  poemcrazy: freeing your life with words.  http://susanwooldridge.com/  Words are tickets to open worlds around us and within us.  Susan uses actual tickets to tape words to... the metaphor is powerful. 

I didn't have a roll of tickets, so we cut up used card stock.  We cut words from magazines and taped the words down to create word "tickets" to fill our “word pool”.   I believe Susan recommends only using magazine words, but kids will be kids and had their own ideas and also wrote their own words on the card pieces. 

Recently, I hauled all the class material to Mel's kitchen table. We began the session by looking through the tin that contains our words and remembering the class. She kept smiling and pointing to her brain and saying, “I remember this! I remember doing! And the kids!”

Then as she picked out word cards, she found one that was hers. Again, her excitement was palpable. She knew her handwriting but could not decode the word. It was Devils postpile. Devils postpile??  She remembered writing it... and the event that prompted the words at the time: a family camping vacation to the National Park that they didn't get to take. She then dug out all the words she had written that day so many years before, laying them out one by one on the table.  They painted a clear picture.

Words can evoke images and feelings, just as images can evoke words and feelings.   And now that I am writing it all out, feelings can evoke images and words.  Such a rich interplay for our creative selves.

She may have been the “kid” in the class that started the trend to write her own words. The magazines were not giving her what she wanted.

The cards she was laying out on her kitchen table led to a discussion and words exploration that eventually had us create a category of Forest. 

Mel looked through the existing word pool from the class and also made new ones when she thought of a word she wanted to include.  The practice of thinking of a word to match an image or idea in her head and then writing it down was valuable.  It was also valuable to search through the existing word cards and new words from magazines to seek out Forest words and  non-forest words.  

This led to thinking of what is the opposite of Forest. We created City.  We put the two main categories at the top and their respective words below them.  We found that most of the words in Forest were applicable to City.  City prompted cars, traffic, potholes, roads, buildings, and litter. We realized as we went along that those things are often in forests too, especially National Parks.  We moved the words that were in both places to the space inbetween on the table.  As we continued the exploration, a new word would get put under Forest or City, but upon reflection, eventually almost all of them moved to the middle column. Taxis seemed to be the lone city-only item.

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