Love is all you need: A LOVEly start to February at Footsteps
With Child Mental Health Awareness week, Random Acts of Kindness week, and Valentines day, dominating the first few weeks of February, it is no surprise that Footsteps wanted to focus on sharing, caring and friendship, as well as expressing emotions as our important themes. With challenging circumstances for so many families, a whole lot of love couldn’t have come at a better time.
Across our footsteps family at Maple Cross, Watermead, Farnborough and Chalfont we have been focusing on different activities – both visual and creative to help discuss how we feel. At Chalfont we made some coloured traffic light faces to talk about how we feel when we are angry, sad, happy and worried and the children could pick the colours and copy the faces onto them.
Maple Cross did lots of activities such as selfie taking and looking in the mirror to talk about all the things we liked about ourselves.
On Wednesday 3rd Feb Watermead celebrated Inside Out Day – wearing our coats inside out in recognition of the importance of not keeping our feelings inside. The children thought this was very funny as we set off outside to see more things that made us feel happy in our outside areas. The children loved their special “If you can be anything be kind” bubbles from the team.
At Chalfont the children have been making heart Valentine’s pictures and practising cutting skills and fine motor skills. They have been choosing a special friend to give these to as part of the activities for Acts of Kindness week. The 2-3s made flowers and also played with the train track – practicing turn-taking in recognition of the importance of being kind.
Cooking also featured heavily as our children cooked up some culinary delights. They were certainly made with lots of love. Featured were heart shape pizzas, love heart short bread for Valentine’s as well of lots of their favourites – we even celebrated pancake day a little early as they LOVE them so much.
Maple Cross investigated all the things our children loved to do the most and recreated these. There was a trip to the farm with our small world play, animal lovers bingo and building towers – as well lots of heart inspired arts and crafts too.
At Watermead we made themed pink playdough that we could cut or squish into shapes, Valentines coloured sand and pictures in our tuff trays, practised writing/mark making in our cards and made some beautiful textured hearts with tissue paper.
Farnborough got creative and upcycled their Christmas tree into a love tree with salt dough decorations, heart shaped hop-scotch, created some calm time with hearts made of natural resources also and made some very special love potions with flowers, water, glitter, hearts and a touch of Valentines magic.
We hope that all the children have been sharing as much love at home over half term as they have at Footsteps.
