Is your little one struggling with their emotions? Knowing what they are feeling and how to manage them? Emotional development (and finding strategies that work) can be hard. Which is why it’s important that you’re exploring emotions with your kids and this is one activity that’s easy to implement and allows for amazing conversations to take place.
Grab the Bear Emotions Labelling Pack (which is free) and then grab the book “I Feel the World” by Zanni Louise and Dr Ameika Johnson and you can begin exploring emotions with your kids.
In the download there’s a playdough mat that you can use over and over again (I pop mine into a plastic sleeve or you can laminate) and eleven different emotions that you can use to create your own emotion discs or stones.
But how can you use this?
🐻 You can read the book together and talk about how your kids might feel or even how they are feeling right now. By encouraging them to chat about their feelings, and how they are feeling in varied moments, allows them to build a greater understanding of what might make them feel a particular way.
🐻 Something that you could do in your classroom, or even at home, is each morning discussing how they are feeling and what they feel grateful for. Practicing gratitude is a great way to allow your kids to connect with their thoughts and feelings on an even deeper level!
🐻 Use the playdough mat for them to create the face of the bear and show how they might look if they were feeling a particular way.
🐻 Choosing one of the discs and then creating that emotion on the playdough mat.
🐻 Making a second set of the discs and playing memory to match them up.
🐻 Selecting a disc at random, and encouraging the kids to chat about how they feel when they are experiencing that emotion. For example, when I feel sad I love a big cuddle from my mum.
🐻 Again, selecting a disc at random, but describing a time when they felt that emotion.
There’s so many other ways to use this resource, and this is just a few but it will open up a world of possibilities when it comes to exploring emotions with your kids.
My name is Sommer. I am a mum of 3. A resource creator. A Prep teacher in Queensland. A lover of play-based learning. A special needs advocate. A creative thinker. A believer that learning should be fun.. so fun that they don't know they're learning!
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