Positive Relationships: All in a day's work - the death of a pet

Ask the children in our setting what they like best about it and often the answer will be our guinea pigs. These two adorable, placid and very tolerant little chaps have been an important part of Oakey Dokeys since we first opened our doors. They perform an admirable job daily of settling nervous children or calming the overwrought, and many children see them as part of their routine, bringing food in from home which has to be duly fed to the guinea pigs before they settle down to other activities.

Oakey and Dokey, the guinea pigs, have become pets to those children who haven't any and taught many the responsibilities of caring for an animal. The downside, of course, is dealing with them when they are not so healthy and facing up to the fact that animals cannot last for ever. When the unthinkable did happen, and Dokey died one weekend, we felt the best course of action was to use it as a learning opportunity, a personal way of looking at knowledge and understanding of the world for the children and us.

We realised it was a very sensitive issue so approached every parent/carer first on that Monday morning to ask permission to show their child poor Dokey's body. All the parents were wonderfully supportive and happy for their child to have this valuable lesson. We also offered them the chance to come back earlier if they wanted to be with their child at that time. Many of the parents were as upset as us, knowing how important he was to the children.

We chose circle time to share the sad news, explaining first what had happened, then answering questions, which mainly consisted of why he was dead. Most of the children chose to stroke Dokey as he lay wrapped in a blanket and no one was as upset or scared as we had expected. We sang 'Twinkle, twinkle little star' in hushed tones and a very quiet goodbye song.

Our most recent passing has been of Patch, Dokey's replacement, and again we followed the same procedure but this time feeling more confident as we'd been through it before. Again we were amazed at the children's total acceptance, curiosity and overall resilience. And this time around the biggest conversation was, 'How is Patch going to get to heaven?'

As a team, we learnt that we should all trust our instincts and embrace every learning opportunity, even those we think could be too uncomfortable.