Remember the snow globe you had when you were a kid?
You loved that thing.
You could shake it and put that winter scene into motion, and then watch — as those flakes settled down, soft and gentle.
Made you feel tranquil and at peace, didn’t it? It didn’t even have to be Christmas or winter.
All of the happy trappings of that, in 21st century, pandemic form, were being shaken out Tuesday afternoon before Adam Messenger’s class of fourth-graders at Mylan Park Elementary School.
That’s because Becca Fint-Clark and Heather Tanton were in the front of the room at the school on Chaplin Road, with their signature, five-minute glitter stress jar recipe.
Both are agents with the WVU Extension Service and both work exclusively with 4-H youth development outreach across Monongalia County.
Here’s the recipe: Take a container (the agents were in possession of plenty), add a helping of clear glue (not too much), and some water (again, not too much) and the aforementioned glitter — with which the class really needed to be mindful of, Fint-Clark said with a chuckle.
“OK, friends, we don’t want to spill any of this,” she said. “We don’t want to give our custodians stress trying to clean it up.”
Secure a lid, let the mixture marinate, and then give it a shake, to watch the glitter do its Zen-dance.
“Looks like hand sanitizer,” student Mason Houck said, as the glue went in first.
Call that a metaphor, Fint-Clark said, for a generation of pandemic grade-schoolers who may have already forgotten what life before the contagion was like.
Of course, a student is going to think about hand-washing, she said.
And mask-wearing, and social-distancing, too.
“This is their reality,” she said. “This is what they’re living, right now.”
And stress, especially of the COVID-19 kind, is still relative — even if you still have a bedtime.
Maybe a youngster lost a grandparent to the coronavirus. Or another relative. Or a neighbor.
Even more scary and sad, maybe he watched and fretted, as his mom or dad had to undergo a hospital stay.
This past December, health practitioners were watching and fretting in anticipation of what they already knew was going to happen.
That’s when they (correctly) predicted a spike in cases, which were the uptick of all those Thanksgiving and Christmas get-togethers.
Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, had an especially busy December, talking about the emotional health challenges among children — challenges roiling just like COVID.
All that glitters …
Which brought it back to those jars and their mindful contents at Mylan Park Elementary.
Said vessels are also known among counselors and therapists as “calm-down” jars, or “sensory” jars.
They aren’t just a kid thing. They’re an everybody thing.
As it turns out, glitter can keep substance abuse patients grounded. And it can help people who are overtaken by their angst more often than not, in today’s tumultuous times.
“This is a proven method,” Fint-Clark said. “The idea is that it’s going to chill us out and make us more mellow. Will it work for everybody? Maybe not. But it’s worth a try, right?”
Meanwhile, Mason’s classmate Vanessa Morgan, allowed that it just might.
She’s a big sister with two younger siblings at home, who most recently, she joked, “tried to kill each other.”
Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad, she said, with a grin breaking out from under her mask. There has been some yelling. And an altercation. And a scuffed-up wall. Maybe.
“I could use this,” she said, eyeing her jar, as a red-and-blue mix of glitter made its own cosmos.
When the session was done, Mr. Messenger and his charges thanked Fint-Clark and Tanton.
“Let’s take a little break,” he said.
That meant pulling out a library book for some pleasure-reading. That meant casting a gaze into the glitter jar.
“Then we hit the math.”
Wait.
Did he say, “math?” Isn’t that subject traditionally an inducer of stress for most students?
“I know, I know. That’s why they’re getting the cooling down period.”
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