This week's book of the week was The Color Monster by Anna Llanas.
The book is a gentle exploration of feelings aimed at young children... One day, Colour Monster wakes up feeling very confused. His emotions are all over the place; he feels angry, happy, calm, sad and scared all at once! To help him, a little girl shows him what each feeling means through colour.
We started this week's activity by drawing simple faces on a large board which portrayed different emotions e.g. happy, sad, surprised, angry, calm etc. We then read the Colour Monster story and talked about how we were feeling that day and why we felt that way. To help the children try to express their feelings further, we asked them to paint or draw on some large white pebbles, copying the colours used throughout the book and then asked them to tell one of the practitioners what feeling they had painted and why. Some children painted a single colour/feeling but most choose a variety of colours to express how they felt.
This activity was fantastic at encouraging the children to express their feelings while also reassuring them that any feeling they felt was ok. It was also good for their fine motor skills when holding a paintbrush or pen. Some of the children took their stones home to show to their families. The children also made some light jars using a glass jar which they painted, some wire for a handle and into which they could put a tea light (battery powered for safety).
This week we also commemorated Remembrance Day. We talked about what this meant in a gentle way the children could understand and observed the two minute silence at 11am which the children all managed to do marvellously! We gave the children the opportunity to make their own poppies, either using large sycamore leaves or on some wooden boards (which were better for painting on). If the children used board, they cut the wood themselves using a hand saw.