It’s been a fairly dark and drizzly time outside this week which has given us plenty of time to sit with the children of Stepping Stones and talk about this week’s topic, feelings and behaviours. Let’s face it, it’s not always easy talking about what’s going on inside, but that’s ok and that’s what we’ve wanted the children to understand. It’s ok not to be happy all of the time, we all get the huff from time to time. Being able to talk about it and learning how to deal with different emotions whether it any come from feeling glad, excited, sad or frustrated etc has been our main focus.

We have talked about what makes us feel happy and what makes us feel sad and discussed how we behave in different situations. We have made emotion pebbles and dice so that the children could discover a range of different feelings outside of the usual ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ words that we most commonly refer to. We have talked about what it means to be kind to others and different examples, like listening and sharing.

This theme has linked really nicely with Remebrance Sunday and the school’s poppy project. Stepping Stones have made 11 miniature, blue poppies to remember the millions of animals that died during WW1. Although War is a difficult thing to explain to young children, explaining that it was sad to have lost so many animals but their blue poppies were a beautiful way to remember them gave the children a positive focus. They look very cute and the children really concentrated hard on them.

We have started working on the Stepping Stones nativity this week as well. We don’t want to give away too much information right now as the children are still busy working on the script. However, did you know that the baby Jesus arrived at the stable in Bethlehem via Helicopter!!!??? No, neither did we! 😉 Should make for some interesting prop making sessions.

In other news, we have been looking at the number 3, the letter ‘t’ and colour blue. We have made cinnamon scented play dough which has smelt sooooooo good! AND to top everything off, we now have bio-degradable aprons AND a new purple potty! Very exciting times.

Have a wonderful weekend from us all at SS! 🙂