A Picture is worth a thousand words!

I read the kidlutions blog about feelings with play dough faces and though it sounded like a fun exercise. We love play dough, and hardly need an excuse to get it out. I decided

to draw a face out line on the etcher sketch as I don’t have a laminator at home to use the face images provided.

I find it difficult starting an activity when it is completely adult initiated AND you have a relatively set game plan as in this case, especially with a 2 year old toddler finding her independence. But I was going to try. I drew the face and pointed it out. My Daughter often accurately points out when someone is smiling or crying, especially her new baby cousin, so I made a smiley face, talking to her and explaining ‘look let’s make a face. Ooh look - smiling’ she didn’t seem interested in my face…Heck, there was play dough to play with and balls to roll from the silver coloured dough which makes her fingers glittery. I rolled silver balls and we lost them and found them again as they rolled under the sofa, the smiley face looking on… I tried again. ‘Oh let’s try another face, this one’s sad, it’s crying’ She proceeded to pick up the sad mouth and break it into bits dropping them on the etcher sketch. She didn’t react verbally, and I thought she was just playing with play dough but as I write this I wonder how I missed her physical display of tearing up the mouth showing me something very real about how she feels about that emotion. Fascinating! We progressed to squeezing all the play doe back into a ball and then cutting it with scissors. Finally she decided to wipe the face template and do some drawing.

A few months back I read a lovely short book called ‘More than Happy and Sad’ by Ros Bayley. She named the 4 main groups of emotions: Glad, Sad, Bad and Mad, and goes on to tell how all are valid feelings and need to be recognised and expressed, and how we should work hard not to let our own attitudes influence our reactions. Like most people I don’t like seeing or feeling Sad, Bad or Mad. I am acutely aware, after this exercise how my attitudes may be rubbing off on my daughter and how I need to work on that to help her be comfortable with all her feelings and how to deal with them in a healthy way. As Goldie Hawn says in Brain Breaks-‘fit your own oxygen mask before that of your child’ and by brain breaks she is talking about reflection and how valuable it is, as this exercise has demonstrated so clearly to me

I learned something very valuable from this . Thank you Wendy!

Wendy does a brilliant blog at

http://www.kidlutions.blogspot.com/

More information on her website about handling difficult feelings with children at:

http://www.kidlutions.com/

Best wishes

Hillary

http://www.toysnaturally.co.uk/

Wood You Play?