Sutton
Teachers used the following strategies to discuss difficult emotions with children:
- Getting the child to reflect on different social situations which they have issues with, which helps regulate their emotions.
- Having social stories so that children have to put themselves in another person’s shoes.
- Having sentence starters e.g. ‘On the playground…’, giving children the vocabulary to help them explain the issues they are feeling.
- Talking about emotions constantly and reassuring children that it is normal to feel these, reducing anxiety.
- In the PSHE scheme an emotion focus linked to a text opens up discussion, with children relating the emotions to themselves through the character in the text.
- In one school every class is given the book ‘Bottled’ to read to promote the idea that we shouldn’t bottle up our emotions.
The Y5/6 children (Mental Health Champions) spent mornings reading the book ‘Bottled’ by Tom and Jo Brassington to groups of younger children. The book is about exploring and sharing feelings rather than holding on to them and bottling them up.
This is a really good stimulus to get children discussing and opening up their feelings and knowing that it is ‘normal’ to discuss feelings.
One Y6 child, in response to reading the book to younger children, then made a disclosure about things that had been going on at home. It turned out that these things had been going on for a few years. The reason the child finally made this disclosure after so many years was because they had been reading the book and encouraging other children to share and not bottle up their feelings.
Jamie Keefe, Muschamp Primary School