Lost words

I haven’t written a blog post in months, my winter was ok, but on reflection, I think during terms 3 and 4, I was in coping mode and had so little headspace to think and reflect, I felt I had nothing to say. The Easter break, getting back to my regular swimming routines, a bit of travelling around and seeing people and the sunshine has hugely boosted my energy, thinking capacity, and mood.

This first week back in term five has been a delight with the children. This week we have been bug hunting; it is a gentle activity to do, it encourages children to notice, slow down; it’s a mindful activity. It’s also a helpful activity to link to feelings and emotions. There are often comments about being a bit scared of specific bugs and noticing what bugs do when they are afraid of us. We talk about how we feel and how we know when we are scared and what we do. One boy told me he was scared of spiders as they might jump out at him, and if they are hairy, they are poisonous; I reassured him we wouldn’t find a poisonous spider here. For this boy, telling me something scared him was a positive step. Until now, he often shows that he is strong, nothing scares him, and we were able to talk about how it is ok to be scared and what we can do when we are afraid how it can be important to notice when our body is telling us we are scared.

I noticed with lots of the children and their friends that joined in was the lost words. They didn’t know the names of bugs; some children thought flies were bees, another child thought worms were snakes, children thought a dandelion was a sunflower or a buttercup, children didn’t know the name for a slug or a beetle. At first, I thought this was one small group, but then I saw it repeated in 8 schools over the week. It has made me wonder, is this unique to the children I am working with?. I wonder if this is Covid related?. Is it due to the enormous amount of time children have missed out on their last year of the nursery? Or the lack of opportunity for them to be outside and explore the awe and wonder around. I would be interested to know if others have noticed this.

For the next few weeks, we are going to continue thinking about bugs, learning names of bugs and flowers and what we see around us; I am hoping to replace those lost words for the children.

Nature and children’s wellbeing

This week it is children’s mental health week in the UK. I know many schools, nurseries and organisations are paying particular attention to the subject this week. I must admit mental health weeks leave me feeling slightly uneasy, our attention needs to be on mental health and wellbeing all the time, not just as an intense look at it over a week. We need to learn how to embed mental health conversations; creating a positive practice around wellbeing and mental health to underpin all of our work.

This term, in my daily nurture sessions with children, I am trying to use the outdoors and connecting with nature a lot more. I have been trying to make sure that all nurture activities when I am in school are outdoor-based and for the children at home, I have been creating packages that they can use at home, encouraging them to get outside. We know from the last lockdown that the outdoors was a crucial element to everyone’s mental health, children as well as adults. I know for many, myself included January has felt very challenging, it’s grey, it’s wet and it’s cold and we are in another lockdown and January has not felt an easy month to get outside. However, when we do get out it is so worth it. Some of the moments of joy this term has been using ice in our play, experimenting with freezing objects, adding colours, using coloured salt on the ice. Making bird feeders and bird spotting, the excitement, and delight from the children of seeing a bird, then finding it on the RSPB bird spotting sheet, children calling out to a blackbird that there is food for them, and calling a pigeon to come and eat. I and some of my team have also discovered how to get bubbles to freeze!. I think that brought us more delight than the children ( strong bubble mixture is the answer- recipe at the end ).

January has been hard, but being outside, being in nature has rescued me. I know it also has helped the children I work with, it has brought them joy and excitement, and discovery. One good thing which will come from this mental health week is a reminder of how important it is that we pay attention to what helps children’s mental health. At the top of my list is the outdoors, if we can help children and families to connect with the outdoors and nature, if we can enable them to engage in the awe and wonder around them, then we are offering them such an important underpinning tool for their wellbeing and mental health.

Strong bubble mixture recipe

1 cup of strong washing up liquid ( eco ones don’t work, I use Fairy)

6 cups of water

1 tablespoon glycerin

Give it a gentle stir and then play. This makes giant bubbles, but can also be used for small bubbles and freezing bubbles- To get them to freeze, let them land, and then after a few minutes, they start to freeze ( needs to below 0 for this to work).

For more information on children’s wellbeing, I have written

Promoting Young Children’s Emotional Health and Wellbeing

Promoting Emotional Wellbeing in Early Years Staff

Awe and wonder around us

February is coming to an end, this is a great time to engage in the outdoors, spring flowers are growing and where I live wild garlic is just appearing, perfect for early foraging. We are so climate aware now and I have noticed an increase in early years setting’s thinking about how they can be environmentally friendly and conscious. Many early years settings are increasing their thinking about how to engage children in the outdoors and support them to have a love for nature and to engage with the awe and wonder around them. I love seeing these examples.

We know that early years children are naturally fascinated by all that is around them, they mindfully notice and are curious about the world in a way that many adults have lost. Around ten years ago I visited a Danish kindergarten and went for a walk in the woods with the children and staff, I observed them foraging their way through the woods, I loved the way the children knew what they could and couldn’t eat and how connected they were to the environment around them. The Danish trip was the start of my love of foraging and also my journey into exploring wellbeing for children and adults, that trip was one of those pivotal moments in my career.

I believe one way to help the next generation to love and protect the environment is by sharing a love of nature with them, one way to start this is by giving them names for plants, helping them to recognise what is growing around them, to learn what plants are helpful for us, which ones we can eat, which ones are poisonous. To do this we need to learn ourselves. I heard someone say recently that foraging is a middle-class countryside hobby. I disagree with that view, you can forage nettles to make nettle soup, they grow everywhere!, blackberries are delicious and grow all over the country, you can eat dandelion leaves ( although they are slightly bitter!) you can make elderflower cordial, and that grows as a weed in cities as well as the countryside.

As I mentioned at the start of this piece, the wild garlic is just appearing in the lanes where I live, this morning I experienced a joyful walk foraging for the new wild garlic leaves, they are such an easy plant to forage for as the smell is so distinct of fresh garlic. If you want an easy recipe for wild garlic pesto this is the one I use taken from woodland trust website

Wild garlic pesto
100g Wild garlic leaves
50 g of Parmesan cheese ( although you can use other hard cheeses)
50 g of pine nuts ( but again you could use other nuts e.g. walnut, hazelnut)
glug of olive oil
the small amount of lemon juice- add a bit and taste
Wash the garlic leaves and blitz all the ingredients together in a food processor or you could use a pestle and mortar. You want this to look like pesto, so if it looks too thick add more oil. Taste and see if you want to add more lemon juice, it’s a personal choice how lemony you want it to taste. You can use this with pasta, with meats as a marinade, or it is lovely in mash potato.

The recipe above fills one medium-sized jar, you can, of course, half the recipe. The Pesto will keep in the fridge for a few days. It’s quite a strong taste for children, so experiment with it, add more cheese which will lighten the taste, and the colour is fantastic, such a vibrant green.

Awe and wonder around us

This weekend my husband and I went to watch the wonder of Starling murmurations on the Somerset Levels, we live quite near the area and it’s something we have started to do each year over the last few years. It’s an amazing spectacle to watch, so awe-inspiring, the movement and fluidity of the birds, in synchronisation with one another is incredible. It is a natural wonder.

This term I am delivering lots of staff wellbeing training, over the coming months I will be delivering this 8 times. In many ways, it’s no surprise that January and February are the months that schools and nurseries are wanting support in this area. For some people January and February can be quite bleak and tough, the lack of sunshine and often endless rain in the UK doesn’t help that. Each time I deliver wellbeing training I talk about being outside, I encourage the participants to get out, to spend time in nature, enjoy the outdoors, to engage with the awe and wonder that surrounds us. This can feel hard to do in the winter months, but it’s worth making the effort. There is growing evidenceshowing how engaging with nature boosts our mental and emotional wellbeing.

Watching the murmuration yesterday evening we were alongside many other people, of all ages, but particularly families with young and older children. It was a joy to share this delightful moment alongside strangers. You would often hear gasps of wonder from across the ages at the sight they were watching, there was something magical that we were all sharing. A reminder of how precious our earth is, how wonderful nature is. I did not doubt that our hour spent out in the dusk, watching birds was a huge boost for everyone’s wellbeing.

The joy with large, wild and deserted spaces

 

I have just spent the last week with my family visiting three islands Arran, Islay, and Jura. It has been a week of slowness, exploration and wild swimming. All 3 islands are beautiful and abound with wildlife. Significant amounts of time were spent watching and noticing, looking for golden eagles, trying to spot otters, laughing at seals playing, noticing hares run by, seeing highland cows on the beach and family swimming in freezing cold water and loving the experiences. This week I have really enjoyed the wide open spaces that the islands provide and I have loved the quietness and lack of people!.

I spend half of my working week supporting children in school who are finding life challenging. This is a wonderful but also at times intense job, involving lots of emotional regulation, being present for staff and children. By the end of the school year, I am aware that I long for space, quiet, fewer people. I also spent a lot of time talking and writing about wellbeing. By the end of July, I know that for my own wellbeing I need to be outside, fully embraced and surrounded by nature for an extended period of time. I have learned over the years how restorative being in nature is. Florence Williams in her the book The Nature Fix: Why nature makes us happier, healthier and more creative, explores evidence from across the world on how being in nature helps our mental and physical wellbeing. She talks about a recent increase in the idea of Forest bathing in Japan, this is basically about people spending time in forests. It is viewed in Japan as a preventive therapy, as a way of counteracting ‘karoshi’ which means death from overwork. The effects of being in forests have been measured with hundreds of people by Chiba University researchers. Their research showed that a casual walk in a forest had a 12.7% decrease on the participant’s cortisol levels and 103 % increase in the parasympathetic nervous activity ( Relax state) (Williams 2017).

Over the next few weeks I will be writing, planning, thinking and dreaming about the next academic year and beyond. I hope that this time spent in truly wild places has helped my creative thought processes.

Awe and Wonder

One of the joys of working with young children is their sense of excitement and wonder with the world, the way they delight at a snail or a dandelion can be delightful to see. This sense of awe and wonder is often lost in adults; we become jaded, worn down by the misery that we hear on the news, this feels especially relevant today on the back of more terrorist attacks.

This morning I walked around the community meadow, this is one of my weekly rituals, each Sunday morning I walk, think and enjoy the early morning stillness. The joy of walking around the same space each week, all year round, is that you notice the changes. This morning it was great to see how high the grass has grown, the recent rain has helped the growth. I also saw the wild orchids had come back. I have seen these orchids growing year after year for the last 23 years that we have lived here, but they still fill me with a sense of awe and wonder when I see them back, each year. By choosing to stop and notice, by engaging with a sense of beauty and awe, I feel this is nourishing and nurturing myself.

In the yearly cycle of nurture work we are now entering the last term, the term when we stop and reflect on what the children have achieved this year, on how far the children and the staff have developed. I love this term as it is an opportunity to spend time reflecting back on how distressed and unhappy the children were in September, to think about the fears we had back then and to recognise the progress that has been made and celebrate that achievement. I see this term as the chance to celebrate the awe and wonder of the children we work with over the year and recognise the change and the difference we have made.

I think as adults we need to be open to noticing the beauty that is around us, that might be in the people who surround us or in our environment.

Growing new ideas

One aspect I love about being self-employed is the freedom to grow and develop new ideas. Sometimes these work, sometimes they don’t, which can be hard, but I really value the space to be able to try and the space to be able to think creatively. Over the last couple of years, I have realised that I really enjoy the creative process of thinking and developing new projects/ resources and I am learning to be braver about trying to push these forward and see if they can grow and take off.

Over the last year I have been working with my husband and 2 close friends on developing one of these new ideas, it started as an idea for a children’s illustrated book to explain Bipolar to children and then developed into the idea of making this into an animation as well as a book. Over the last 5 weeks, we pushed forward a crowdfunding project to fund this idea. We knew we were being highly ambitious in the amount we were trying to raise and we were really unsure if it would work ,if anyone would want to back it. We didn’t raise the full amount we needed, but we did have pledges for half the amount .

When you try out a new idea, you often don’t have a sense of whether it will work, it can feel really risky, you’re putting yourself in a vulnerable position of risking rejection and criticism and that is very hard. The flip side of that is people do support you and you discover that people love you and believe in your idea. That has been my experience, as a group working on the Mummy’s got Bipolar project we have all been deeply touched by the support we have been offered, the generosity of people. Alongside this the incredibly moving comments from strangers telling us that they didn’t know how to tell their children about their Bipolar, messages of encouragement from people living with Bipolar telling us there is a great need for this project.

This morning I went for my usual Sunday morning walk around the meadow at the back of our house. This is a space where I can think and reflect. This morning I noticed a small horse chestnut tree sapling growing on the edge of the meadow. I loved noticing the beauty of this tiny new tree and the possibility of the great tree it might grow to become. We have been really encouraged by the support we had through sharing the idea of our project with others; our project feels a bit like that tiny tree, I still don’t know quite what it will become, but we are going to try and continue to see if we can make it grow.

Unwinding and slowing down

 

My school year in the nurture role has now ended for the summer holidays. I still have other work I will be doing over the break, but it is a 7-week break from working with 4-year-olds. On Friday evening I and my family came down to Cornwall for a family holiday on the Lizard. The last term has been a very tough term, particularly emotionally. During this term, I have been using various techniques to try and stay calm and not allow the stress to take over, not always easy. I have been trying to use mindfulness daily, I have been regularly listening to the beautiful, calming tracks of Olafur Arnalds living room songs and my morning swims have helped to get me through the term. In the last few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about swimming in the sea, a friend on Facebook Karen Arthur swims in the sea daily and photographs what she sees. I really enjoy seeing Karen’s images daily, seeing how she captures the beauty of the sea and how she has used this to help her through depression . For the last few days I have been able to swim in the beautiful green sea, I love wild swimming, I find so much delight in the beauty and the immediate closeness to nature, when I am swimming in the sea, my brain and body immediately switch off from the tension and stress and focus on the delight of that moment.

I know that taking, this time, to unwind and slow down is vital, a time to care for myself, a time to enjoy being with my family. Not all work has stopped, as I am still keeping an eye on the Mummy’s got Bipolar campaign, and still trying to get more support to make that happen, but at least when I am in the sea swimming I can have some time when nothing else matters other than enjoying the moment and the beauty.

Stopping and noticing beauty and change

 

 

This term is about reflecting and reviewing the nurture work over the past year. It is time to write end of year reports, remember the children as they were in September and recognise the tremendous change , they, their staff and I have seen over the year. It is about stopping and noticing the beauty in their development.

The year has at times been fraught, there have been many tears and much laughter. Some highlights for me have been seeing children who started the year very scared and frightened are now laughing, joining in, making friends. Being able to write end of year reports and describe a child as being a happy, smiling, joyful child is a wonderful achievement. Once again I have seen school staff work so hard to accept, love and support these children. Once again I have been reminded that progress for a child is not just about their academic attainment.

Throughout the year I have walked around the meadow at the back of our house, every Sunday morning, it’s a bit of ritual for me, it is a place where I can think, reflect and just be. A thought I had this morning was about the changes I see in the meadow through the year, in the Autumn it has been mown, it is short, sparse and a bit spiky, in the winter if often looks quite bleak, then in the spring it begins to develop new life, to grow and develop and in the summer it is space of beauty. This morning I noticed the butterflies and moths have returned, more of the wildflowers were there, it is back to being a space of beauty. But you only really notice the butterflies and the flowers when you slow down and notice and look. I felt this was really similar to the nurture work. There are times at the beginning of the year where it is hard and spiky work and there are many times in the year where it feels really bleak. But it does change, through the process of remembering and reviewing, of stopping and noticing the small changes that have been made, we can see the beauty that has developed and that is something to celebrate.

Re-connecting with nature

 

This last week has been a half term holiday for me, a small break from working in schools, an opportunity to refresh and relax a bit. I have spent large chunks of the week re-connecting with nature. I spend a lot of time with children outside, helping them re-connect with their feelings while outside, this is great but it is work, I work hard while with the children commenting, supporting, observing, modelling to staff, supporting staff and enabling the child to engage.

So this week I felt that I needed to reconnect my feelings with nature. When you work with children who find life hard, who become dysregulated quickly, it is so important to be aware of your own feelings, emotions and needs. I spend a lot of my time telling staff they need to be kind to themselves, so I need to make sure I do that myself!

Since a trip to Denmark over 5 years ago, I have developed a love of foraging!. So this week I have been enjoying foraging and cooking. I have enjoyed cooking nettle soup, elderflower cordial and red clover cordial. I have also enjoyed times of walking barefoot on grass, in meadows and on a beach. I love the experience of walking barefooted, it makes you feel more connected to the earth, more aware of what is around you. This morning I took my usual early morning Sunday walk in the meadow at the back of our house, I love the beauty of this space and how it changes over the season. It is now almost at full height, with the various grasses, clover, wild orchids and oxeye daisy’s growing. There is a path mowed around the edge of the meadow, for the community to be able to walk around and enjoy it without trampling all the wild flowers. I walked it this morning barefooted, I noticed this made me really slow down, really take notice of what was around me. This felt very timely as I know I am about to enter my busiest term of the year, ending with current children, meeting new children and supporting an extra four year six children, as well as training and writing. Lots to look forward to.

 

Photo of Tunley meadow