This year has been tough on children’s mental wellbeing so in light of mental health awareness this month we have been exploring our emotions.
The Colour Monster is a wonderful book we have at nursery that is a great way to introduce the topic of emotions to young children. The pre-school children made some stress bags that included drawings of the colour monster, a stress ball that they made using a balloon and flour, fidget toys and glitter jars that they also made and were mesmerised by. It was lovely to see how well the children engaged with this activity and collaborated together. We have also been looking at our reflections whilst making different faces and then drawing these onto stones using the colour that most represents how we are feeling and discussing how we can help make our friends feel better if they are feeling sad.
We love being outdoors and are out an about either in our garden or the local community daily. The baby room children visited our local park one morning and took our bright and colourful parachute with us. We spent the morning singing nursery rhymes, pretending we were a band, dancing and laughing. Time spent outdoors having fun playing with the parachute all contribute to our children happiness and wellbeing and the activities are linked to the development of the babies communication and movement skills.
We are fortunate to be located within walking distance to Canary Wharf where the Adams Plaza Bridge has been renovated by artist Camille Walala. The children love the different colours on the bridge and they even noticed that the artists style is very similar to this month’s artist of the month – Piet Mondrian. The colours on the bridge presented another great opportunity to talk about our emotions and associate different colours with a particular feeling. One of of pre-schoolers said proudly ‘ I like the yellow bit because yellow makes me feel happy!’.
