Exploring Emotions in Early Years – Faces, Families and a Surprise Visitor 🙂🐸

Following on from last week’s activities, the children continued to discover more about themselves, their families and their feelings — and even had an unexpected guest in the garden! This week’s focus on exploring emotions in early years gave plenty of opportunities for fun and learning.

Exploring Emotions in Early Years Through Play

As part of their Personal, Social and Emotional Development, the children had a fab time creating funny and imaginative faces. Using spaghetti along with colourful eyes, noses and mouths 🍝👀👃, they designed some truly hilarious expressions.

We also introduced Mr Potato Head 🥔, which gave the children the chance to move eyes, noses, mouths and eyebrows around to make different expressions. This playful activity encouraged them to recognise how small changes can completely alter emotions — an important step in exploring emotions in early years.

Measuring Ourselves

The children also explored how tall they were 📏. With Lauren’s help, they measured their heights using paper and string, and then compared who was the smallest or tallest. This hands-on activity helped them begin to understand basic mathematical concepts such as “big” and “small”, while also encouraging estimation and measurement skills.

Fun for Our Littlest Ones

Our youngest children had just as much fun. They explored bubbles in lots of different ways — blowing them through wands, splashing in warm soapy water with bath toys 🛁, and creating dense foam using bubble bath.

Mark making also took centre stage in the baby room ✏️. The children enjoyed experimenting with pencils and discovering the different marks they could make on paper, an important step in early writing development.

A Special Visitor

To top it all off, we had a surprise visitor in our nursery garden. A toad — affectionately named George 🐸 — hopped in and kept the children fascinated for quite some time. Encounters like this are a lovely way for children to connect with nature and spark their curiosity.

It was a week full of discovery, laughter and learning, and we can’t wait to see what adventures await us next week at Fun Box! 🌟