Emotional learning is having a moment. There isn’t a book, conference, training day, or professional development program these days that doesn’t touch on the subject. It’s a clear sign of how much psychology has shaped education. Of course, it’s helpful for practitioners to learn about emotions, but in everyday nursery practice, emotions shouldn’t be treated as another “subject” to teach. They should be felt, talked about, and lived. 

In our early years teaching team, we never designed activities specifically to teach emotions. We always believed emotions should be woven into every project and every nursery experience, cross cutting and ever present. We are emotional beings; there’s no other way around it. Emotions aren’t something you teach as content; they’re something you keep in mind at all times.

We always chose projects where emotions were naturally part of the process. Because emotion isn’t a topic to be learned; it’s an inner force that moves us and sparks that childhood hunger to dive into what truly matters. We worked with questions and themes where feelings emerged on their own. We never treated emotions as a stand alone unit. Because it isn’t a subject, but a state of mind that invites eager, wholehearted learning. Education, in the end, is about walking an emotional path through the things that matter in our lives.

We don’t believe you can do emotions in isolation, with a single activity or within one subject, and then switch them off when it’s time for Maths or Language. Emotions are always there. That’s why teachers and practitioners need to learn how to integrate them into every subject, every activity, every relationship, and every situation that unfolds at nursery. And emotions aren’t only present in what we do, but in how we do it, in our methods, in nursery relationships, in how we relate to families.

So yes, we need experiences that allow emotions to surface: group games, songs, theatre, stories, magic, painting, dancing, any form of expression that connects body and soul. Every emotional state in our children deserves space: joy and sadness, fear, grief, sorrow, satisfaction, anger, calm, peace. And they deserve to be named, in circle time, in the playground, wherever life happens. Talking about what’s going on inside us. Putting words to what we feel when emotions spill over. That’s how we grow into balanced, healthy human beings.