Skip to main content

Welcome / Intro book


Purpose:
The Welcome Book, also known as an Introductions book. It's a book that provided in advance of the first meeting and is intended to help a child/children transition to a new home. .

Formats:
The welcome book will obviously need to be tailored to the child/ren and their ages.
There are some online shops which offer welcome books, but I found that the waits didn't really fit in with the timescales I was looking for.

I actually made two in the end. One as a printed board photobook and, because the delivery times changed from the original, another using a self-adhesive photobook and adding photos and captions to it. As my little one was turning three around the same time and was still occasionally prone to chewing on things she shouldn't or not caring for her paper books properly, a board book seemed a safer option. 
This decision came after a chat with the foster carers and a social worker, where i was able to ask about anything to take into account. 

Transition toy:
I asked about favourite animals/interests and also if they knew of any fears or bad experiences with animals/toys, before i settled on the right toy to use with my little one. As you can probably guess from my little picture above, in our case, we had monkey. 

What I included:
I originally outlined a lot and included some interests and some close friends that they would have in their life, but after some discussion with my social worker, we cut these all out and kept it simple.

"Monkey visits [Little One]'s new home" 

I included monkey in each picture as i introduced her new mummy, our car, the outside of our house and each room of the house & garden. I finished it with a photo of me reading a bedtime story to the monkey in bed and a photo of me and monkey with the caption "Mummy and monkey look forward to seeing you soon!". 

Who/ how / when to hand across:
In my case, this was discussed in a transition planning meeting. The book is typically introduced to the little one(s) by the social worker, though it can - and in this case, was - the foster carer, if they have a more appropriate relationship to discuss it.


How it went?
 In our case, little one loved it. She took it to show her mummy to each member of her foster family, she took it to her nursery to introduce them to her new mummy and show them her new house. I was sent a little video of her second reading of it, which came through when I was with my parents and I can't say there was a dry eye in the house.

Other useful links:

*Note that this is different to an adoption story book, which is more akin to the life story book, which i'll come back to later.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Playful frustration tactics

See this one and recognised myself in it too https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1M2hgBswdT/ That point of frustration is hard and sometimes I do take the moment to put on my own oxygen mask first, I.e. to breathe before I yell. Mostly though, it's better to be a robot or a lion or a monster.  Me doing a play roar and then acting surprised that it wasn't loud or came out wrong &  getting little one to do a bigger roar than me has helped her re regulate far better & far more frequently than trying to encourage calm when she's feeling anything but that!  It's mostly worked out that later she's been about being nervous or excited about something & not quite ready to work out what that feeling is or what has prompted it. A little time with a silly voice saved us a lot of yelling!
Post a Comment
Read more

Contact prep - the emotional rollercoaster

Oh my goodness! I have said I'd share the good and the bad and phew has this been highlighting a  lot.  This does - so far- have a good ending, but oh my goodness it's been hard work. I will therefore apologise in advance for some ranting and less positive reflections - this isn't everyone's experience, but it's worth sharing in case this is useful for anyone to be prepared/know it's ok! Honestly, Getting this set up has been a lot of hard work and nagging that it shouldn't be. I'm going to skip for now the bit of just getting to the stage of engagement with the social worker about direct contact  The social worker for contact is separate to any of the previous social workers. This social worker's primary responsibility is working with the bio family to support them - though also to be able to assess them - to know the headspace they are in and ensure contact is safe. They are normally responsible for both letterbox and direct contact. They should ge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Contact - letterbox

(See also  Contact: Letterbox and Voices of birth parents  &  Contact - settling in letter ) Different children and agencies have different letterbox agreements. Contact generally is something they're trying to encourage more in modern day agreements. I'll do a different post on the detail of why's and some of my own thoughts/reflections, but it's likely that there will be an attempt to have at least letterbox contact, even if not direct contact. So, our agreement is once a year, but whilst little one is younger and so much changes so quickly, then i try to put something together for each month, I don't always manage to write it in month, but have the extra bonus of getting to use it as a lovely tool to think about the changes, developments and achievements in that month. I've been able to share when LO is asking questions about them, or about when she was with them - one example was when a friend was pregnant they showed her their ultrasound and LO asked ab...
Post a Comment
Read more