Professional books – for your shelf

50 fantastic ideas for songs and rhymes

By Helen Battelley

Publisher: Featherstone       

Paperback: £9.48 

Action rhymes are one of those early years activities that remain just as popular today as they did a hundred years ago – or more, but if you feel like your repertoire is starting to run out of steam, 50 fantastic ideassongs and rhymes could be just what you’re looking for. 

To encourage interaction, turn taking, and social skills, as well as acting as a great tool in the development of speech and language, Helen Battelley provides all the information you need to get the very most out of every rhyme time. 

Each rhyme is broken down into what to do, what’s in it for the children, taking it forward, what you need – props that can be used, and top tips, with the rhymes themselves being a mixture of well-known old favourites and some that were new to me – and some I’d forgotten about, but they are all given a fresh perspective with suggestions on new ways to present and perform each one. 

This is a great book to keep on-hand, so you can just pick it up and choose a rhyme as needed, and it’s full of colourful photos of pre-schoolers that make it good for sharing with children too. There are specific areas of learning that can be brought into focus through these rhymes, such as counting and sequencing, learning about other cultures and traditions, and lots of physical activity and spacial awareness. I felt the ideas for taking the learning forward were particularly helpful, providing a starting point from which you can build follow-on activities.

Helen Battelley is well qualified on the subject of songs and rhymes having been a music and movement specialist for more than 19 years, as well as an early years consultant, trainer, and founder and director of ‘Music + Movement – children’s dance and movement workshops’. Helen’s passion for getting children moving led to her involvement in the nationwide initiative; ‘Change4Life’s ’10 Minute Shake Up’.

50 fantastic ideas for sustainability

By June O’Sullivan and Nick Corlett

Publisher: Featherstone

Paperback £10.99

Preparing children for their responsibilities as global citizens continues to take an ever more prominent role in early years education, and as inspiration for creating some original activities that show how we can reuse, repair and recycle, 50 fantastic ideas for sustainability is a good place to go. 

The book contains a broad variety of activities for both the indoor and outdoor environment, from seed bomb making and plan-pot scarecrows, to watching worms eat and making a tyre bug hotel. The format follows other books in the series, including what you need and what to do, with activities being quick to set up, low on resources and simple to follow. It is also made clear how specific areas of learning can be brought into the activities, such as incorporating some of the craft ideas into science experiments.

All activities are multi-layered and cross-curricular, which include the use of many teaching strategies such as narration, demonstration, dance, and music, to help bring everything to life. The purpose of the book is stated as being; ‘To share activities that can help nursery teachers, parents and carers provoke conversations with children and with each other about making changes in our daily lives to help us become more responsible, respectful and actively engaged in the sustainability agenda’, and I feel this is well covered here, as activities have been thoughtfully devised to show sustainability in a variety of contexts that include not just reusing junk items but helping sustain plants and wildlife too.

I particularly like the plant drip feeders - something I’ve not tried before.

Authors, June O’Sullivan – CEO of the London Early Years Foundation, and Nick Corlett – senior nursery manager, sustainability lead and chair of LEYF Men in Childcare, have a wealth of hands-on nursery experience between them with June having written other books in this series.

How to Tell Stories to Children

By Silke Rose West and Joseph Sarosy

Publisher: Souvenir PressPaperback: £11.04 Kindle: £7.09 Audio CD: £20.04

How to Tell Stories to Children is a comprehensive guide to the craft of storytelling, including insights into the Zbond that is created between adult and child when you tell a story you design yourself, plus practical strategies you can use such as incorporating a child’s personal events and objects into a story, and establish a rhythm.

This is ultimately a book about how you can brighten a child’s day with a good story, and there’s a lot here that will be useful for nursery staff. The chapter ‘stories to teach’ has lots of guidance on how to embed a message into a story not just to teach, but to also foster cooperation and model acceptable behaviour. This is particularly useful for demonstrating consideration and kindness towards others, by taking away the I am the teacher, you are the child positionality, and instead giving the message you wish to convey as a third person narrative. In this way no one feels they’ve been told off and children get to feel they’ve discovered the message for themselves.

I think the chapter titled, ‘Nuts and Bolts’, is particularly useful as the art of storytelling is broken down into separate components. This includes colour, shape and texture, puppets and props, and developing a theme, so making it really easy to see how you can bring something a bit special to story time. I also like the way the book includes several good sample stories, which together with the practice exercises at the end of each chapter, help bring everything together in a meaningful way. Ultimately, this is a book that leaves you appreciating the beauty and importance of storytelling as a craft.

Silke Rose West is a Waldorf teacher with more than 30 yearsexperience of working with early years children. In 1995 Silke co-founded the Taos Waldorf School, and today runs early years forest school; Taos Earth Children.  Joseph Sarosy is founder of The Juniper School, an outdoor school for children aged six to nine years, and is also an author, with his blog; The Storytelling Loop, being read by over 70,000 people worldwide.

Meno pause – 35 women speak

By Caroline Vollans

Publisher: Amazon

Paperback: £7.00 Kindle: £2.50

Did you know October 18 is World Menopause Day? No one can deny the subject of menopause has certainly been getting a lot more attention of late; from breakfast TV to Radio 4’s Women’s Hour, programme makers have been bringing in celebrity guests, keen to share their experiences.

There are quite a few books on the subject too, but Caroline Vollans tackles the subject with a direct and honest approach that I really liked in her new book; meno pause: 35 women speak. By using spoken accounts of women with personal experience of the subject, the  message that comes across is that every woman has a unique experience of the menopause and although night sweats and hot flushes are certainly common ground, there’s a great deal more to look at here, with the author believing it’s time health care practitioners looked at the needs of each woman as an individual rather than simply treating every woman of a certain age as though they have a single and duplicate set of symptoms.

Each chapter of the book is given over to a separate female voice, with each contributor asked to respond to just one question: ‘What would you like to say about the menopause?’ This open-ended approach, allowing contributors to speak freely; sharing anecdotes and voicing their own questions, gives the book a nice, personal feel.

It’s not all doom and gloom either, with some women telling of a feeling of excitement at entering a new phase of their lives, such as Karen: ‘It never felt like the end of my youth. I feel at the height of my life.’ And those for whom the whole experience was somewhat uneventful, such as Edie: ‘I don’t think I have anything to contribute.  My menopause was a total non-event.’ This is a book that does a good job of showing the menopause not as a cliché – the stuff of jokes about women turning into she-devils – but rather seeing it as a more nuanced subject that can bring with it a broad spectrum of symptoms; both physical and psychological. As the author says, ‘Who better to tell tales of menopause than women themselves?’ A good book for the staffroom that I’m sure would appeal to women of all ages.

Caroline Vollans is a writer, psychoanalyst and teacher with a desire to give a voice to stories that might otherwise go untold. 

Moban and Sky’s Mindful Adventure

By Bernie Leonard

Publisher: Dixi Books

Hardcover: £8.95

Mindfulness now plays a part in many pre-school curriculums, gaining recognition as an important tool in making children feel relaxed, calm and generally happier. 

In Moban and Sky’s Mindful Adventure Bernie Leonard shares seven mindfulness techniques aimed at improving adult and child wellbeing. Using the characters of Moban, the mindful monkey and Sky, the stressed out skunk, this book takes the reader through a five-week programme using seven techniques, the idea being to practise one or two of the techniques over a period of five weeks and record what you notice.

Although you might think you’ve read it all before when it comes to mindfulness teaching, there’s actually some really good practical ideas here. I really liked the ‘STOP practice’ used to help settle the mind, calm down, and reduce negative emotions, and even though this book is primarily aimed at children of nine years upwards, I can see that these techniques could easily be adapted for early years. For example, rather than thinking of ten things to be grateful for in the gratitude practice, children could just think of one, and the mindful eating technique using raisons could be a fun one to try with early years at snack time, as well as using some of these ideas for drama and music and movement sessions. 

The author’s overall message that even little changes can have a massive impact on our wellbeing by making us happier, healthier and more skilful at responding to difficult emotions, is backed-up throughout by use of simple scientific explanations and diagrams. A good book to get you thinking about life’s priorities and the joy of little things.

Bernie Leonard is a psychology graduate and a qualified teacher of Mindfulness.