A Treasure Trove of Feelings!
From the moment our children enter the world they are emotional beings. However, they are not born with the ability to understand, label and work through their feelings in a healthy way. Those are skills they learn from the caring adults in their lives.
Healthy social and emotional development starts with attachment. Infants need to attach to a loving adult to feel safe and secure. It is one of their most basic needs. An infant can then begin to learn about emotions from the interactions they have with their loving caregivers.
Understanding emotions helps babies and young children to begin to learn self-regulation. Self regulation is the ability to monitor your own feelings and behaviors so that they are acceptable and produce positive results such as mental health, loving relationships and the ability to learn. Finally, when young children feel safe and regulated they are able to explore the world, learn, grow and develop! This is what we want for our children.
Sometimes our very little children have very BIG feelings. When our little ones are having BIG emotions it can feel stressful for us too. That is when we need to remember to take some deep breaths (or use other calming strategies) to keep ourselves regulated. When we are calm we can foster our children’s emotional intelligence. That does not mean that we will protect them from difficult emotions. Instead, we help our children develop their emotional intelligence by showing them that emotions are a part of life and helping them learn to express and work through their emotions in healthy ways. In other words, in order to help our children develop emotional regulation we need to view their emotions as learning opportunities!
Here are a few things to keep in mind when those emotional learning opportunities arise throughout the day...
All feelings are OK. It is what we do with our feelings that can have good or bad outcomes. Allowing your children to experience and supporting them to work through all of their feelings in a healthy way, will equip them with valuable life skills.
Be a feelings coach by noticing, labeling, understanding and supporting your child to work through his/her feelings.
Model for your children by talking aloud about your own feelings. Make sure to model for them how you work through your feelings in a healthy way.
Activities
Treasure Chest of Feelings
You will need a shoe box (or similar sized box), art supplies, magazines, and scissors.
Start by showing/drawing your child an image of a treasure chest. Explain that this was a box where treasure was kept to keep it safe.
Together use various art materials to decorate your box and turn it into a treasure chest.
Then talk about how you have been on a treasure hunt for feelings over the past weeks. Try to remember together some of the feelings you have talked about.
As you remember the different feelings you have talked about you and your child can either draw or cut images of feelings out of magazines to put into your treasure chest.
You can play different games using your chest of feelings such as feeling charades (take turns picking a feeling out of the chest and acting it out) or hiding the feeling faces all around the house and doing a feelings treasure hunt.
Feelings Party
Celebrate feelings with a Feelings Party!
Bake cupcakes and frost them. Provide decorations and encourage your children to make different emotions faces on each cupcake with them.
Make emotions themed snacks. Gather crackers or rice cakes and spreadable cheese or peanut butter along with raisins, peanuts, chocolate chips, cheese and whatever else you have on hand to create feeling faces. Spread crackers/rice cakes with cheese spread/peanut butter and then encourage children to make each one into a different emotion face using the ingredients provided.
Play emotions themed games (use some of your favorites from past Feelings Treasure Hunt activities).
Sing Emotions songs like the one below or “If Your Happy and You Know It” (from past Feelings Treasure Hunt Activity).
Feelings Fishing Game
You will need one or two sticks, string or yarn, 1-2 magnets, tape, paper clips/safety pins, paper and crayons/markers.
First, cut out circles and draw different feeling faces on each circle.
Next, tape a paper clip/safety pin to the back of each feeling face.
Tie a two foot long piece of string or yarn to each stick.
Tape a magnet to the end of each string.
Start by turning the feeling faces upside down on the floor with paper clips/safety pins on top.
Now fish! As feeling fish are caught the “fisherman” can name the feeling and either act it out or tell a time when he/she felt that feeling.
Be creative and change up the rules to the game. Maybe you can pick a featured feeling fish for each round and the fisherman to catch that feeling fish is the winner and gets to do a victory jump/dance. Have fun!
Play Feelings Memory Game
Print two sets of feeling faces from this link: Feeling Face Cards
Depending on the age of the children you are playing with you may want to use all of the cards or pick out a few of the feelings that your children will know.
Be sure to have two cards of each feeling you are going to use.
Turn the feeling cards over so you cannot see the faces.
Each player turns over two cards to try to find a matching feeling face.
If the cards match the player gets to keep the set and try again.
If the cards don’t match they are turned back over and the next player gets his/her turn.
Play continues until all of the feeling faces are matched and no cards remain face down.
The player with the most cards wins.
Be sure that throughout the game you find opportunities to label and talking about the feeling faces with your child.
Make Pasta Feeling Faces
You will need several bags of unique pastas and some flash card sized pieces of paper with different feeling faces drawn on them.
You can either draw simple feeling faces on pieces of paper or you can print them from the internet.
Notice with your child what each face looks like and label the feeling. Talk about times when you felt that same feeling. Practice showing each other what your face and body look like when you feel that feeling.
Then try to lay different pasta shapes on top of the feeling faces to make pasta feeling faces!
When you are finished you might consider dumping all of the pasta into a bin and adding in the feeling faces to make a feeling sensory bin.
Read Glad Monster Sad Monster
Get the book, Glad Monster, Sad Monster by Ed Emberley and Anne Miranda, from the library.
Read the book together and as you do talk with your child about times when he/she has felt that same feeling.
Afterward, pick 2-3 favorite Feeling Monsters and make up names for them. For example, “Hank the Happy Monster” or “Worried Winnie.”
Then talk about how a happy monster would dance and make up some happy dance moves. Do the same for the other feeling monsters you have named.
Turn on some music and call out different monsters encouraging your children to dance like the feeling monster using the moves you made up together.
Sing a Song about Feelings
Sung to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
I have feelings (point to self)
So do you (point to children)
Let's all sing about a few.
I am happy (smile).
I am sad (frown).
I get scared. (Wrap arms around self and make a scared face).
I get mad (make a fist and shake it or stomp feet).
I am proud of being me (hands on hips, shoulders straight, smile)
That's a feeling too, you see.
I have feelings (point to self)
You do, too (Point to children)
We just sang about a few.