Through their daily life at The Willow the children’s self-belief and confidence in their abilities will grow. They gain an awareness of the community and people around them and importantly, through the RULER Programme, they begin to understand and recognise their emotions and those of the people around them. We believe that this gives them a resilience to go through life happily and confidently….

RULER has been created by The Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence, it has been built on years of research and Lulu has been trained in implementing this unique system across the school:

RULER is an acronym and stand for:

Recognising emotions in yourself and others
Understanding the causes & consequences of emotions
Labelling emotions accurately – if you can name it you can tame it
Expressing emotions appropriately
Regulating emotions effectively

The first anchor tool for the early years is called the ‘Mood Meter’. This helps the children think of emotions in terms of energy and pleasantness. Parents and teachers alike are delighted by how easy the children find it to use colours to express their feeling and the feelings of others around them.

The second anchor tool is ‘The Charter’ – the children describe the way they would like to feel when they’re at The Willow On The Farm and what they can do to help themselves and their friends feel this way.

Every two weeks a new” feeling word” is introduced, we talk about how that word feels, how to recognise it in ourselves and others and if it is a red or blue feeling how to manage our emotions to get to the right place.

All the staff are trained by a qualified teacher in the RULER method and parents will also have the opportunity to attend workshops to help them’ talk to their children in colour!’.

We have a daily ‘Rest Your Mind’ session after lunch, which involves lighting a candle, using Lavender and doing some deep breathing sessions. This always resets, re-groups and refreshes children for the afternoon session.

Grace and Courtesy

We spend a lot of time encouraging the children to have skills of grace and courtesy, to think of those around them, to remember the ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’, to have good table manners and to acknowledge and respect others.

We make sure the parents have visited The Willow On The Farm Nursery prior to the start of term, ensuring that they have familiarised themselves with the setting, the arrival procedure and the teachers.

Since COVID we now send each child a video of the nursery, both inside and out, showing them where they will be arriving, where their coats go and where the classrooms are.

At the beginning each child and parent will have a one-to-one meeting with their Key Worker to familiarise themselves with each other at the start of term.

Together with the parents we complete a Profile for each child which ensures that from the start we know as much about them as possible and how best to make sure their transition to school is a happy one.

We are a happy and nurturing team and will make every effort to ensure that each child’s start to school is fun and full of exciting adventures.