Little Explorers Childminding - Solihull

Image: Katie hugill childminding

Happy Easter to all of our Little Explorers! Im sure they’ve all eaten their body weight in chocolate by now 🍫 🐰 tbf we stopped by cookie shed today so I know how they’re all feeling! Worth it though-how yum 🤤

I think our little explorers definitely got the memo!! People always forget about the positives of this kind of play!

Thanks to for the great visuals!!

And this is why our Christmas decorations are still up 🎄🤶🏻🎅🏻

Before you start packing away those decorations, or dismantling role play enhancements, consider leaving it out for when the children return from the holidays.

🎄 For children, especially in Early Years, holidays like Christmas which come around once a year can be hard to process – and although you’ll have been talking and preparing for it in the lead up it’s now (after they’ve experienced it again) that their ideas and interest in it will be truly meaningful.

January is such a valuable time for processing what they’ve done and experienced over the holidays – and exploring this in a way which supports their mental wellbeing will really make the most of your continuous provision in the weeks ahead.

A long-running study* led by clinical psychologist Dr Claire Mitchell at the University of Otago in New Zealand, shows how valuable a particular type of talking – called elaborative reminiscing – is for pre-school children.

When the children in the study were followed up aged 15 those from the group who received support with elaborative reminiscing showed less symptoms of depression and anxiety than those in the control group.

Elaborative reminiscing is something you probably do already every day – perhaps without even realising it! It simply means sharing memories of recent events with someone else, making space to talk about them with empathy and validating the other person’s emotions or experiences.

In Early Years, it’s about encouraging children to express how they experienced an event – how they felt, what they saw, how it smelled – all the ways our senses interact with the world to make sense it.

So instead of rushing into the new term with a fresh agenda and putting the holiday decorations in a box – spend some time letting everyone explore them to prompt discussion about their memories of the last few weeks.

📚The study itself can be found here, for those who’d like to read through the whole thing:
Mitchell, C & Reese, E. (2022) ‘Growing Memories Coaching mothers in elaborative reminiscing with toddlers benefits adolescents' turning-point narratives and wellbeing’. Journal of Personality. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12703

Teaching our oldest explorers the importance of making their voices heard! They had a million questions and loved hearing about the whole process. We’re delighted to hear that some of them have shared their new knowledge with their families this evening 💚💚

What you mean you don’t all do the school run dressed like this 🤔😂 safe to say we had a lot of excited children today-our own and the rest of hall Green 😂😂

We LOVED having Timmy T-Rex visit us today 🦖 he bought us our very own dinosaur masks and showed us a dinosaur dance. Timmy was very impressed with how brave we all were and he loved our dance moves-we weren’t sure his were that good. Hopefully he’ll come back again this week 💚

Tuesdays words of wisdom 💚

When one of your school children writes a motivational message on the fridge for the rest of the group 💚💚 “asking for help is not weakness”
Love this and love how kind & supportive they all are to each other 💚💚

Standard Friday night at work 🦖🦖😂😂 getting ready for dino week-might get some funny looks walking round Hall Green 🙈😂