SAFE, ACTIVE & HEALTHY
The promotion of physical and mental health and well-being is embedded into our practice and provision. At Brookside, we believe that early years provision plays an essential role in helping children to develop a strong understanding of healthy life choices and a positive attitude towards being active. This includes educating families and supporting them to promote a healthy lifestyle at home for their child.
Our children experience music & movement each session and learn to regulate their emotions through daily yoga sessions. We use a good selection of books such as the ‘colour monster’ to discuss emotions and feelings and how this might relate to our own experiences.
Brookside believes a warm and nurturing environment provides children the support to develop greater resilience and ability to self-regulate their emotions. Promoting self-regulation skills for children is embedded within our daily practice. Caring and empathetic adults are able to recognise and minimize emotional triggers for children and co-regulate emotional responses.
The aims of our co-regulating emotional responses are to;
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Reduce children’s stress levels
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Help the child return to a state of calm
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Model self-regulation strategies for future use.
Our children experience outdoor play during every session where they are able to explore and move freely, engage in sports and games and develop their large motor skills. We offer children lots of opportunities to develop large motor skills and embed these skills before expecting fine motor skills to be refined.
At Brookside we strongly believe it is essential for children to be able to recognise and manage their own risks. We offer the children opportunities to take risks and develop safety awareness as we take regular walks in the woods where we climb trees, walk across the brook, walk sensibly in pairs and develop trust to return to an adult when called. The children benefit from regular walks within the local community to the parks and the shops which offers opportunity for road safety awareness, following boundaries, development of spacial awareness and being active
Our older children benefit from Forest school sessions where their knowledge of safety extends to fire safety and tool use. The forest school ethos approaches safety by first demonstrating safe use of resources and playing games which reinforce safety rules. Much of this ethos has been taken on during our general practice and walks. For example the game 1,2,3, where are you? develops children's response and recall for safety reasons whilst out on a walk.