It’s the week of love at The Children’s House!! We will be focusing on emotions this week, and talking about what love means to us all – who we love, who loves us, and most importantly, what we love about our own selves! It’s sometimes hard for young children to recognise and verbalise their emotions, so we use a lot of strategies in the classroom to help them with this – for instance visual aids like emotion wheels, and naming feelings for children when they are upset e.g. ‘I can see you seem upset that it’s not your turn to give out the plates today’, and then giving them tools for improving the situation themselves e.g. ‘what do you think might make you feel better? Is there anything I can do to help?’ This helps children to develop their emotional literacy and well-being, and supports them to learn skills of resilience for later in life.

During the week we will be making Valentine’s crafts, creating a Love Tree, doing “The Best Thing About Me” page in the children’s All About Me books, and finally on Friday literally having a ball!! The children can dress up for our annual Valentine’s Ball and we will be having lots of dancing and fun!

Five Little Hearts (fingerplay)

Five little hearts all in a row ,
The first one said ‘I love you so’,
The second one said ‘will you be my Valentine?’
The third one said ‘I will, if you’ll be mine’
The fourth one said ‘I’ll always be your friend’
The fifth one said ‘we’ll all be friends until the end!’

Happy Spring everyone!! This week, as well as discussing the change of month & season, we are going to learn about dental health & the importance of looking after our teeth, tying in to the eating of healthy food – especially crunchy foods like apples and carrots, and calcium-containing foods which strengthen our teeth such as milk, cheese and yoghurts. We will be doing tooth brushing activities, and talking about visiting the dentist, as well as counting our teeth and discussing why we lose teeth! During the week we will be doing a science experiment to show what can happen if we don’t clean our teeth, leaving 1 egg to sit in a glass of vinegar and another in a glass of coke – the vinegar will show how acid can decalcify and damage the tooth enamel, whereas the coke will leave a stain on the egg shell.

Following this, we will then be looking at the food pyramid & doing a lot of activities about healthy eating along with it – we will start off with a discussion with the children on why they might think it’s important to eat healthily, talk about what our bodies need from food and which foods are best for us, and continue from there to look at the food pyramid. After this we will introduce practical activities such as matching sample jars of food to the food pyramid, and we will be making super smoothies! We emphasise the importance of having a good balanced diet and a healthy relationship with food – to know which foods are healthy and which are not, but to stress that having a treat is not a bad thing either! As well as this, we will be talking about using the energy that food gives us to exercise, and how important this also is for our bodies’ growth and development. We will be practising gross motor skills by making obstacle courses indoors and outdoors – should be lots of fun!!

Staying Healthy (tune: If you’re happy & you know it)

To stay healthy, you should always eat good food,
To stay healthy, you should always eat good food,
Eat some apples, eat some peas,
Eat bananas & green beans –
To stay healthy, you should always eat good food!