Face values

Over the past few years a new category of nursery equipment has appeared - products specifically designed to help children explore their emotions. These items tend to focus primarily on facial expression. There are puzzle figures with interchangeable faces, jigsaws showing people reacting to emotional situations, posters, photo cards and puppets big and small. All show a range of expressions: happy, sad, surprised, angry - the more ambitious can be such things as sleepy, bewildered, grumpy and bashful. It all begins to remind you of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

At first blush, these specialised products seem to offer too literal an answer to the problem of discussing emotions with the under-fives. A cartoon face showing a stereotypical expression divorced from any dramatic context seems too blunt an instrument with which to tackle such a delicate area of understanding. However, here more than anywhere else in early education, the key to this type of equipment's effective use is adult involvement. These products are not really toys, they are teaching aids. Leave children alone with them, and they'll enjoy the peripheral functions - putting the puzzles together, for example - but they probably won't learn much about emotion.