One of the children from morning Nursery found a dead spider today in the playroom. They brought it to me and asked me to look how beautiful it was. We spent a little while admiring the spider and its markings along with its long legs. I questioned the child what do you think happened to the spider? ”I don’t know, maybe he got poorly and died?” they replied. The child then shared their own experiences of death linked to a family pet when they were a baby. I invited the other children to come and see the spider and they sat patiently as the child carefully put the spider into a little cup for them to see. He then passed it around his peers.

In Nursery this week we have been thinking about how to help keep our brains healthy and how to show kindness. We have taken part in various crews on sharing, kindness, exercise and our feeling monsters (zones of regulation). The children brought in their own teddies to share with their friends in a circle game. Every other child had a teddy and they sang a song called ”Pass the Teddy”. The aim of the game was to bounce the bear on their knee and then when the music stopped they had to pass the bear to the child next to them without a bear/toy so that they could have a turn too. All of the children were very gracious and kind to share their bears and they were very understanding that not everyone was holding a bear without feeling left out or possessive over their teddy.

Today the children thought more about the range of emotions they may feel via the feeling monsters (zones of regulation). We made stick puppets of the monsters. Nursery recognised that each emotion needed different facial expressions, such as a smile, frown, scowl or excited face. The children used amazing cutting skills to create the faces of the emotion they wanted to explore. They used googly and sticky eyes and drew on the appropriate mouth/ expression. We were were very proud peacocks of our final results!