How Do You Feel?
This activity is a great way to start conversations with your children about their feelings and emotions. It is inspired by The Colour Monster by Anna LLenas and is one of the activities in our May activity box.
Set Up
For this activity I used the crayons, play dough and emotions cards from our Colour Monster activity box. This was simple to set up and nothing else was required.
We started off with the angry emotion card as it was an emotion that M had clearly experienced the day before. As soon as I started talking about the angry monster, M recalled the incident from the day before which had made her angry and so drew that first on the card. It was really interesting listening to her thoughts on her own emotions. When I asked her to use the play dough to express how she feels when she is angry M started to poke and jab the play dough.
M used a mixture of text and pictures to express her thoughts for each card. I did not want to dictate what she did on each one as I wanted her to not worry about the actual physical side of getting her ideas down and wanted it to be meaningful to her. I was so impressed how much she already understood about her own emotions and with careful questioning she could express her thoughts and ideas really well. I made sure that throughout this emotions activity I talked about my own emotions too and those of the colour monster in the story.