We’re in a season where I receive multiple requests each day for play dough. While most of our time with play dough is simple free play, I wondered if I could occasionally use that play dough fascination for some sort of play based activity to nurture emotional growth. So, I created these printable play dough mats to create faces together. We referenced our emotion books to pick out emotions to make. If you haven’t made one, you could simply ask them what emotion they’d like to make. Even if the faces don’t quite capture the emotion accurately, it’s a helpful way to recognize the components of each expression. It was…
-
-
A Book of Emotions
This project has been a long lingering item on my to do list, but now that it’s finished, I love flipping through the pages with the boys. It’s been such a simple, helpful tool for nurturing emotional growth in little ones. Since Graham was a tiny baby, I’ve attempted to capture a spectrum of emotions with hopes of documenting the fleeting seasons. And the more that I documented, the more that I wanted to eventually put them into a book as a tool for building an emotional vocabulary. It’s been a priority for us from pretty early on to give him words for expressing what he’s feeling. We wanted to…
-
Nurturing a Whole Child in Emotional Growth
“So often children are punished for being human. Children are not allowed to have grumpy moods, bad days, disrespectful tones, or bad attitudes. Yet, us adults have them all the time. None of us are perfect. We must stop holding our children to a higher standard of perfection than we can attain ourselves.“ —Rebecca Eanes It seems we have slowly but surely begun to quiet bits and pieces of what it means to be human because we find them inconvenient, difficult to understand, or beyond the realm of our control. But we are naturally feeling creatures. Our feelings can’t be isolated or separated from the rest of us. For better…
-
A Journey in Nurturing a Whole Child
This series of thoughts on whole childhood began as a real time documentation of our learning process and reflections through our first year with Graham. I felt so overwhelmed from the beginning that I would fail him unintentionally by my simple lack of knowledge in how to nurture his proper development. I knew that I wanted to nurture the whole of him, equipping him with resources early on for connecting with his emotions and creativity and spirituality. I knew that I wanted to instill a love of learning and a heart of compassion. I knew that I wanted him to have an appreciation for nature and the physical world, as…
