Safe is ............ (PBs in Practice)

Following a recent 1 day PB workshop I was contacted by Judith who works with nursery aged children and had introduced them to PBs via an activity based on one question: 'What does safe feel like?’ The children were encouraged to use the sentence stems ‘I feel safe when ……..’ or ‘Safe is …….?
What follows are their responses and a picture of the resulting display will follow.

“Safe is:
My Dad; my Mummy....when my Mummy’s my friend; Mummy’s hands; holding Mummy and Daddy’s hands when I cross the road, otherwise I might trip over and a car might hit me; being with my teachers; putting plasters on; my Mum and Dad; being with ‘D’…’D’ lives with Nanny and he sits on the sofa and I sit on his knee; my Mum; playing with Mummy, Daddy, ‘A’ and ‘D’; my Mummy; when my Mummy changes my clothes.”
“I feel safe when:
I stay on the pavement; Mummy gives the plate and I eat; you have to hold hands; my house is clean and soft….and when Spiderman goes round and spins his webs; I hold ‘O’, ‘N’s little baby. When I smile at ‘O’, he smiles at me and ‘N’ laughs.”
“At home I feel safe.” “Drawing makes me feel safe.” “I feel safe seeing Ollie’s chickens because they lay eggs and I can use the eggs to make cakes with Mummy and be happy.” “My Dad helps me feel safe.”

These children were aged between 46 and 52 months (3yrs 10months-4yrs 4months) and were already able to describe what safe feels like to them – they just needed someone to give them the opportunity to talk about it.
Thank you so much Judith for letting the children know that 'we all have a right to feel safe and for asking the children ‘the question’. Once a person knows what safe can feel like they are then able to recognise when perhaps things don’t feel like this and talk about that too.

Some photos as promised - thanks again Judith.

Good work Judith. Absolutely love it. Quite true that if you ask a simple question it often opens doors to amazing answers

And here's a photo of the full display! (if you click on the picture you can see a bigger version).



I really like being able to see the words that describe the conversations behind the children's work. What a wonderful example of the strategy of Theme Reinforcement which is available every day as a reminder to all.

We have done some more work to build on our prior experiences with PBs -- we read the lovely story about Rabbit and how he was feeling frightened. The children loved the repetition in the story and were able to empathise with rabbit and talk about his network people in his garden.

PBs are very simple to embed in practice and teaching in Early Years, I can say from experience that children are never to young to begin to have an awareness of feelings!

Fantastic Stuff Judith - the Rabbit story is brilliant at illustrating how persistence might be needed to feel safe again. It was written by a good friend and ex-colleague of mine, Jenny Tarry and Jenny has given me permission to share it with PB People so we are planning to add it to our resources section of the site which will be in The Training Room. Jenny took all the photos of the Rabbit puppet and his puppet friends on her farm - the chickens are however real!