Case study – Sofia

Sofia is a year six pupil attending a mainstream school. She has a disruptive home life and displays angry and violent outbursts towards her sister at home and to peers at school.

Challenge

• To reduce outbursts at school
• To increase the amount of time spent in class

Strategy

The CAL emotional regulation programme was used to enable Sofia to recognise and understand emotions within herself i.e. what the emotion is, how and where it feels, what the reaction is, what her level of reaction is.

Once emotions were identified and understood we would look at identifying and understanding triggers and then put strategies in place to manage them.

For Sofia these strategies included breathing exercises, being able to remove herself from the situation and releasing the anger in a different way before she became violent – she was able to identify the feeling of getting hot and her teeth becoming clenched as an indicator.

A soft toy version of the dog she was working with was given to her – one for home and one for school. The soft toy was used to cuddle when needed and as a visual reminder of her strategies given to her by the dog.

Each week she was able to verbalise to the CAL school assistance dog team any incidents that had occurred over the week and talk through them. Shewas able to identify where strategies could have been used differently and how to implement them if a similar situation was to arise.

Outcome

• Overall reduced outbursts at school and home.
• Improved and less violent relationship with her sister. The reduced incidents at home resulted in improved family time and days out to places that she had been unable to attend previously due to behaviour.
• Increased settled and productive time spent as part of her class, meaning a greater access to education and less disruption for her peers.