* Mood Stars *
Sad or happy...
That was the emotional spectrum in my classroom. For a Nursery with almost 100% EAL I suppose that isn't bad going but lets be honest, who hasn't asked a class how a character is feeling and got a chorus of 'saaaad'? As much as I verbally modelled different emotions both in play and teaching they just didn't seem to stick.
So I had been reading about emotional literacy and found a resource called 'my mood stars'. In this blog I am going to share some of my provision and experiences of introducing this resource into my setting.
They were delivered when the children were there and opening the box to find them really added to the excitement (not that this was planned). I sat the children down and spoke to them about how special they were (as we loose everything!) and introduced each character. The characters are pertinent to the emotions children will regularly feel. To my surprise the children immediately started referring to them by name using vocabulary like angry, excited etc. The sensory element really appealed to my little ones and they spent a long time simply removing them from the Velcro board and holding them.
Once they were all settled in I moved them into the 'calm down' area. I wanted to connect them to children's emotions so added mirrors and familiar books to the provision. Children copied the faces of the stars and were continuing to use the vocabulary, which was great.
Following this, I introduced some mark making so that children could represent the emotions. There are blank copies of sheets like these on the my mood stars website. I was finding that I was using them in a variety of contexts e.g. to support PSE development in play and to exemplify a characters emotions in stories.
Now that the mood stars are integrated into our provision we are deepening our understanding. and focusing on certain emotions. This is the set up for 'angry star' which includes a sensory bottle and other related resources. We are going to look at a different emotion each week and use the stars to form the basis of this. The only down side I have found is that the black board regularly comes away from the frame when the children are playing so I am going to look at ways to more firmly attach it but apart from that I am thrilled with our new resource!
How have you used them in your setting?
Comments
Post a Comment