Guides
- Making History: A Social Worker’s Guide to Life Books
An excellent guide for social workers on how to create a life strory book.
- LifeStoryWorks.org
LifeStoryWorks.org website provides a very helpful guide on how to create a life story book from scratch.
- Social Work Handbook: Life story for work children and young people in care
Guidance on life story work for social workers by Kent County Council (includes an example of a completed life story book)
- Life Story Work: A resource for foster carers, residential social workers, adoptive parents, and kinship carers, to support this work
A guide for carers explaining what life story work is and how they can contribute to it
Useful templates
1. A Life Story Book template for children who do not live with their birth family developed by Government of Western Australia
2. Life Story Book template for Aboriginal children developed by Family and Community Services
3. Generic Life Story Book template developed by Family and Community Services
4. Personal Life History book contains a template which is intended to be used as part of therapeutic life story work. As a 30 session brief psychotherapy tool, the Personal Life History Book is designed to help children reduce their transfer rates to new homes. The child’s distress is channeled into a personal record book of positive memories as well as traumatic ones. This enhances the sense of personal continuity and conscious access to mental rather than behavioral representations of past relationships. Any or all members of the child’s network may be included: birth parents, foster parents, caseworker, and extended family members. In addition to children in formal foster care, the Personal Life History Book is useful for: children of incarcerated parents, in the process of family reunification following foster care placement, in guardianship homes, and in homes with relatives.
Click here to view/download the workbook for children
Click here to view/download an accompanying manual
Example of completed life story books
A completed Life Story Book by LifeStoryWorks.org
