Activities for children from 3-5 about emotions and feelings?

Question

I am on teaching practice and want to do an activity with the children at mat time about emotions, I've drawn some faces with various feelings on them but cant think how I could use them. Has anyone got any creative ideas?

Answer 1

There is a great book by Barbara Pollard called "Feelings: Inside and Outside, Too" It was one of my son's favorites as a preschooler. It has black and white photos of kids in common situations and they are a bit ambiguous, which allows the kids to figure out the different possibilities for emotions associated with the depicted situation.

Answer 2

Lead a discussion to help children gain an understanding of how their words and actions can promote certain feelings and/or actions.  While all feelings are acceptable, help children understand that some actions are not acceptable. For example, name-calling, hitting, biting may be a result of feeling angry or hurt, but these actions do not help lead to a resolution of the original problem.  Use some of the below questions to prompt discussion:

   How do you feel when someone shares his or her toy with you?  What might you do?

   How do you feel when someone will not share his or her toy with you?  What might you do?

   How do you feel when someone says that he or she likes the block tower you just built? What might you do?

   How do you feel if someone knocks down the block tower you just built?  What might you do?

   How do you feel if someone calls you a name?  What might you do?

      Invite children to paint or color pictures of people showing different feelings and emotions. Have them discuss how colors can be used to express emotion.  Ask them how each color makes them feel.

      Play music with different tempos and moods and ask the children to describe how the music makes them feel.  Have them move to the different music while expressing the mood the music evokes.

Answer 3

Give them some patterns to scrawl.............some paper to mke airplanes and origamy like creations?............some beads and puzzles the list is endless

Answer 4

You could do some sort of drama...

Like maybe ...

Stand up holding the face on your face . then the kids have to shout out what your feeling ( or rather what the paper is feeling. )

Example    :

   :(                  SAD!

whatever you do REMEMBER:

CHILDREN LOVE GAMES.

hope this helps.

good luck

X

Answer 5

make your own story up. like for each page have an emotion. and read it. like use different animals. and then at the end ask how you think this animal might be feeling and they find the right emotion. well the one they think is right. no right or wrong answers but ask why you think they feel that way. i did this on placement with 4 year olds. good luck :-)