From the Heart of the City: Developing Emotion-Literate Children
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Our Journey to Developing Emotion-Literate Children within a Maintained Nursery School
Through our work with the Birmingham Virtual Schools and supporting children who are Looked After in Social Care, in April 2023 we embarked on a journey to become a Trauma-Informed Attachment Aware School (TIAAS).
Attachment Aware Schools
An Attachment Aware School is a place where resilience is promoted and where the most vulnerable children are able to recover from trauma.
This whole-school programme of support, led by the Educational Psychology Team, helped both our Federated Nursery Schools, Marsh Hill Nursery School and Perry Beeches Nursery School, to progress on a journey to becoming Trauma-Informed Attachment Aware schools.
Through participating in the programme, our staff are now equipped with new knowledge and skills, enabling them to apply trauma and attachment awareness strategies in school.
The approaches used in the TIAAS programme are based on current and up-to-date theory and research in this important area of child development.
Evidence suggests that attachment awareness in adults can lead to increased self-regulation in children (and adults). The capacity to self-regulate underpins emotional wellbeing and mental health and enables the development of cognitive skills and learning.
Emotion Coaching
A key element within the programme is emotion coaching.
This is an evidence-based whole-school approach towards responding to children’s emotions. It is a way of interacting with children and young people and promoting positive relationships.
Emotion coaching helps children to become more aware of their emotions and to manage their own feelings, particularly when children are experiencing strong emotions.
Through our TIAAS training, we quickly realised that emotion coaching and creating emotionally literate children was relevant for all our learners, not just those most vulnerable children who have experienced trauma.
As the SENCO, I looked at how we could make emotion coaching accessible to all our children, some who are as young as 2 years old. I researched what was available within the early years and quickly realised that there was very little published and even fewer resources targeting learners within the early years sector.
With this in mind, we decided to create our own way of making emotion coaching accessible and fun by using the book The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas.
The Colour Monster
The Colour Monster teaches children about feelings and helps them understand their core emotions, as each beautiful colour leads to an emotion.
It helps children build understanding and empathy towards others, as in the story the emotions are attached to deep descriptions of how the little furry monster feels inside.
We introduced all our children to the book through daily storytelling time so that they became familiar with the emotions and the colours used to represent them.
Through our Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED) work, we explored the different emotions and our children began to reflect on when they had experienced them or seen them in others.
We looked at how each emotion feels and how our bodies feel when we experience each emotion. Fun sessions took place where children used mirrors to explore their own facial expressions and lots of role-play time to explore different emotional scenarios.
Through the daily use of a self-registration and feelings board, our children can now register their particular feelings upon entry to the nursery and at any point throughout the nursery day.
Staff are always vigilant to any children who need extra support or who may be experiencing an emotion that they need to be supported with.
Emotion Zones
Each class has an emotion zone, where children can go to if they need time to regulate their emotions or a quiet place for emotion coaching to take place.
Each staff member wears PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) cards on their lanyard with different coloured cards to reinforce the colours and their corresponding emotions. These are frequently used to support learners to express their emotions or for a staff member to express an emotion and a subsequent teaching point.
For our youngest learners, non-verbal learners, and other children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND)—who may find the notion of a variety of emotions complex and overwhelming—we have kept the range of emotions to a minimum and introduced Makaton signs for each emotion.
Empathetic Engagement
Once the children understood the different emotions, we could then develop our use of emotion coaching by the adults in the settings; it now underpins our Behaviour Management policies in both settings.
Through emotion coaching, we use moments of heightened emotion, and the resulting behaviour, to guide and teach our children about more effective responses.
Through empathetic engagement the child's emotional state is verbally acknowledged and validated, promoting a sense of security and feeling 'felt'. This activates changes in the child's neurological system and allows the child to calm down, physiologically and psychologically.
Impact of Emotion Coaching
The Impact so far has been truly astonishing. We are so proud of how all our children have developed their emotional literacy skills. The children responded so well from the beginning and showed a real understanding of the rationale behind using the book The Colour Monster.
They loved exploring emotions and the colours that the monster experienced and it gave them a practical way to articulate their own emotions in a fun and developmentally appropriate way.
We have seen our learners begin to understand more complex emotions above and beyond happy and sad.
Our learners are now skilled at recognising how they feel and more importantly why. They can associate the colours with the feelings we experience and can analyse how people feel inside.
They are building empathy towards others and we are seeing children asking adults how they feel and showing empathy for others.
We are seeing improved behaviour throughout both nursery school settings and children who are more emotionally regulated.
Children and key workers have developed deeper relationships and the children are developing deeper relationships with each other.
We have held parent workshops to share the positive work of TIAAS, emotion coaching and The Colour Monster with the families of our learners. The feedback has been 100% positive and has given parents a new tool in helping their children develop their emotional literacy skills.
We are excited about the future, further embedding our programme of emotion literacy within both Marsh Hill Nursery School and Perry Beeches Nursery School and sharing the exciting work with other settings and feeder primary schools!
Blog author: Lisa Taylor Hawkins, SENCO at Marsh Hill & Perry Beeches Nursery Schools