From Dancing to Mindfulness in the time of COVID: Movement and Dance-Based Activities to Support Families through Telehealth Sessions
Date & Time:
Saturday, June 13, 2020
11 AM- 1PM
Location:
Offered Live and Online via Zoom.
Course Description:
As practitioners working with “at-risk” families how do you hold a child’s attention through video conferencing sessions? During this extended period of time when parents are asked to continue to maintain “stay-at-home” orders, what activities can they do to engage their children and support them to express the array of diverse feelings they have? Mindfulness activities are helpful, but how do you get children to slow down, breath and focus when they have been confined indoors and are quite literally “bouncing off the walls”? Dr. Suzi Tortora, internationally acclaimed dance/movement therapist, teacher, author and senior dance/movement therapist at Integrative Medicine Services, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s MSK Kids, will provide you with practical and creative clinical tips and activities for children ages birth – through early elementary age, using movement, dance and story to help families engage with their children, release stress, enhance self-expression and be able to implement mindful practices that support both caregivers and their children. Be ready to move and groove and you try out these ideas too!
Objectives
Gain an understanding about how a child’s body actions [ages birth - early elementary] and behaviors are nonverbal cues that can be transformed into meaningful movement and dance-based self – expressive activities during telehealth sessions/lessons.
Learn how to create individualized movement and dance- based activities to release stress in children [ages birth - early elementary] and engage them with their therapist/teacher during telehealth sessions.
Explore and learn how to use movement and dance activities to transform dysregulated behaviors into more regulated actions that focus a child’s [ages birth - early elementary] attention to obtain a mindful state of awareness the child can use during and after telehealth sessions/lessons.
About the Instructor
Suzi Tortora, EdD, BC-DMT, CMA, LCAT, LMHC has a full-time private practice in Cold Spring, New York and NYC, specializing in parent- infant/child and family therapy; trauma; medical illness; and adult chronic pain. She is the International Medical Creative Arts Spokesperson for the Andréa Rizzo Foundation, having created and continuing to be the senior dance/movement therapist for pediatric patients at Integrative Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, NYC, since 2003. She received the 2010 Marian Chace Distinguished Dance Therapist award from the ADTA. She teaches in Europe, South America, New Zealand, Israel and Asia; holds faculty positions in the USA, The Netherlands, Chech Republic, Argentina and China; offers the Ways of Seeing International Webinar Training Program for dance/movement therapists and allied professionals; has published numerous papers about her work; and her book, The Dancing Dialogue: Using the communicative power of movement with young children is used extensively in dance/movement therapy training programs internationally.