3-Year-Old Kindergarten
That's a wrap on Term 1, it has absolutely flown by so lets take a look at what we focused on.
Term one saw the 3-year-old Kindergarten program focus on emotional regulation to help the children to identify and understand different emotions and learn how they can cope with them appropriately.
Emotional regulation has been our focus topic for this term as it is a key aspect of children's development that affects their understanding of situations, how they respond, how to can resolve conflict and express their needs. Supporting children to understand and manage emotions also provides them with skills that they will continue to use throughout their lives. Children learning how to regulate their emotions also has the benefits of coping with stress, developing better social skills, resolving conflict in more constructive ways, being better able to understand and empathize with other people's emotions and understanding their own feelings and learning ways to cope with their stresses and different emotions.
We introduced this topic through the story 'The Colour Monster' by Anna Llenas, which is a lovely story about the colour monster who is feeling all mixed up and very confused, and the girl explains that it is because his feelings (and colours) are mixed together. The girl begins a mission to help her friend recognise and separate his feelings so she assigns a colour to each emotion: yellow for happiness, blue for sadness, anger is red, black is fear and calm is green. This story was a fantastic way to support the children in identifying and learning the names of different emotions and associating an emotion with a colour has encouraged the children to incorporate this language into their everyday, for example "I feel yellow because my friend is playing with me." We extended on this story as it was so popular and engaged with, by focusing on a different emotion/colour each week so that we could explore each emotion deeper. After going over these emotions each we we would ask the children the question 'what makes us feel this emotion' and created lovely posters with the responses we received, which showed us how well they understood the topic.
Along with this we provided learning experiences that would then further extend on their knowledge of emotions that allowed for the children to explore this topic in smaller settings. We set up a colour monster sorting table where the children sorted the colour monsters emotions into jars (just like in the story) and this spurred many conversations with peers on how they were feeling as well as asking others "which colour monster they were feeling". We also did a marble painting activity to allow the children an opportunity to talk one-on-one with a teacher about their emotions as they created their own colour monster!
The colour monster was so effective in supporting the children to identify feelings so we will continue to use the language from this story throughout the year. We also wanted to ensure that we not only helped the children to identify and understand their feelings we also wanted to support them in knowing what to do when they are feeling these different emotions. The 'When I'm feeling' series by Trace Moroney was a perfect way to extend the children's knowledge further as the stories provided examples of the characters feeling big emotions while offering solutions and different ways to handle these feelings. For example 'When I'm feeling angry' highlighted that it is okay to feel this emotion and there are appropriate ways to cope with it, such as taking a break in a quiet space, taking deep breaths, going for a run and talking to someone about it.
When reading other stories throughout the day we would also ask the children what a character might be feeling and they would tell us an emotion, before prompting them to explain how do they know this character is feeling this way. For example, if a character appeared sad the children would respond with, "they are crying, he looks blue and he has a sad face" which showed us that they could understand the emotion they saw in front of them, which supports them in building empathy.
We are so proud of the children and how far they have come in just one term and look forward to continuing to support their growth, development and learning in the terms to come!
A big thank you from the Forest room team: Kelly, Kristyn, Demmi, Sikha and Danni