We envision a location and space where children want to be. A place which taps into children’s imagination and creativity while providing the needed clinical resources to help them succeed in life. With that in mind we would like to give you a glimpse of the vision that we see for the future. We invite you to travel back in time with us to the age of steam.......
Our autism clinic otherwise known of Emerald's Imagination Station, is designed around the old train depots in the Texas heartland. This train focus orientation helps to instigate the creative process in our children. Its sage green walls, old cast iron furnace (not in yet..its being refurbished), ticket booth, and Tack board with times for arrival and departure of trains, teleports families back to the time of steam engines! It is here that families wait to see a counselor, a psychologist, a speech therapist or even an occupational therapist.
A Glimpse:
After parking their car in the side parking lot, a young family exits their car and sees a lit up sign in green that reads “Emerald's Imagination Station.” On the side of the building is a mural showing the great steam engine trains of the past, smoke billowing from the stacks.
Walking through the main entry, the family finds themselves in what appears to be a lobby for a train depot. Maps of train lines through the great state of Texas, hang on the walls. A train ticket booth with a train arrival board entices children and adults to give a closer look at all the train memorabilia in the lobby. After the children and family finish their counseling session, the counselor asks the children if they would like to “board a train car and travel to a place of castles and and magical forests?” The looks on the children’s faces read: “Is the counselor for real? And... No way!" The counselor smiles and leads the family past the train ticket booth and down a side hall. The hall walls are covered in paintings and pictures of trains and what appears to be a train tunnel at the far end. The counselor opens the door to the train tunnel and reveals......
We will just allow your imagination to run wild at this point. The colorful image we have replicated here through words are only partially completed at this point in time. The lobby, as described above, exists in the here and now and is shown in the photos, complete with its maps of Texas rail lines and ticket booth.
The murals of trains and train tunnels are future projects that will help expand Emerald's Imagination Station as an autism clinic.
And yes, we do have licensed clinical professionals on staff (counselors and psychiatrists) who are specialists helping young adults on the spectrum.
Emerald's Imagination Station
The Corodor of Imagination
The Corodor of Imagination leads into the rest of Emerald's Imagination Station. its purpose is to instigate imagination and creative thinking in the children through visual promps. Murals of steampunk trains, and flooring resembeling train tracks will be visable to children as they walk down the corodor. At the end of the Corodor of Imagination stands a train tunnel door. Passing through the "tunnel door," leads into the rest of Emerald's Imagination Station.
The Great Hall and Steampunk Library
The Great Hall and Steampunk Library is a multipurpose room used for conducting group therapy, art therapy, individualized play therapy as well as social skills roleplaying. The images your see here are visual concepts of what could be. We envision bookshelves that line one entire wall with dark wood paneling covering two of the four walls of the room. Aspects of steampunk art such as flying ships add a bit of flair.
The Ever Changing Room
The Ever Changing Room is exactly what it sais, a room that is ever changing. Projectors will be used to change backdrops on the walls from castle backgrounds to adventures in outerspace to traveling to depths of the sea in search of Atlantis. Future changes to Emerald's Imagination Station will result in a room about thirty feet by twenty feet that can be used for social gatherings, educational seminars (for children, parents, educators and clinical professionals) as well as large scale group projects that focus on team work and enhancing self-esteem.
The Creative Process Paradigm
In all of our programs we follow the Creative Process Paradigm in seeking to help our kids.
The creative process paradigm has three underlying assumptions:
- Children with developmental delays that show a significant level of intelligence but lack the ability to easily learn through observation will naturally use the creative process to find alternative solutions.
- With children who have developmental delays, the creative process is almost always one of their biggest strengths.
- The environment is a key factor in both encouraging, and enhancing the creative process in children.
What is the creative process? We see creativity not as an abstract idea on how imaginative or artistic a child is but as a problem solving tool. In short, creativity is the combining of old ideas or concepts with new idea to develop alternative solutions to various problems.
Used effectively, the creative process can help us develop a range of items from better ways to study for an Autistic child to new treatments for cancer.
Our clinical environment expressed above seeks to use the environment in such a way as to enhance treatment outcomes, to not only encourage children to come to see the clinicians but also acts as a clinical tool providing various treatment strategies and interventions that can be used not just by the counselors involved but also by the parents for the welfare of their own children.