Managing feelings and behaviour in an EYFS setting.
Growing Cudjack builds on learning from Trelya’s previous Youth Music funded project to support the musical, personal and social development of children aged 0-5 who face barriers to accessing music-making as a result of living in Cornwall’s most deprived community and facing multiple barriers associated with high levels of deprivation. Growing Cudjack uses regular delivery of workshops, activities and one to one sessions to support development of children in the areas where it has been identified that they need it most - managing feelings and behaviour. The project is tailored to meet the specific needs of 1) individual children and 2) children within a group setting.The project also enables nursery staff to develop the necessary skills, knowledge and expertise to support children’s development in this area through quality, inclusive music making activities beyond the life of Growing Cudjack. This is the first of a series of posts that give a brief overview of both individual and group progress.
Jan 2020: Improvements and/or challenges in children’s emotional and behaviour management - We have been focussing on staying safe, self care, how we feel and cooperation/ turn taking. Sang 'Miss Polly' and discussed being sick, going to the doctors, describing how we feel. We also changed the words to some other familiar songs to focus on self care, behaviour and how we feel - the children enjoy improvising in this way and it makes for a more accessible way of them discussing their own experiences, fears and concerns. 'Happy And You Know It' is a popular song among this group and we used the song by substituting 'Happy' for other emotions and exploring feelings and experiences through this song. There has been a lot of interest in transport recently - particularly flying. I discussed my impending trip to Zambia and we sang 'Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines' and used the rainbow streamers to imitate the motion of flying up and down.
Improvements/developments in how other workers use music to support childrens emotional and behaviour management - Staff supported delivery by distributing instruments, modelling their use, praising and questioning the children’s contributions, adding their own contributions, singing and joining in. We talked about being kind and gentle and sang the songs softly and loudly to illustrate this. Duncan (all names changed) was very vocal throughout, Susannah, Katie and Archer also added ideas and suggestions. Kirsty and Archer joined in with songs, selected and played instruments but didn’t respond much to the chat or questions.
During Duncan's one on one session he wanted to talk about 'Where the Wild Things Are'. He recounted the whole story almost verbatim without support. We illustrated the narrative with different instruments, singing and sound effect - adding changes in volume, ferocity and tempo.