Child Developement

Activity: Able Emoter

Children experience a wide range of emotions much before they learn to recognise or understand them. From anger to excitement, sadness to frustration, young children go through many emotions every day. However, with young children, it is often difficult for them to understand and express feelings or label their emotions. Prior to emoting, identification of our emotions itself is a very important part of growing up and having fulfilling social interactions.

A great skill we can foster in our children is to understand and express their emotions. If you can name it, you can tame it! When we give them the tools to understand the emotion they are experiencing, it’s half the job done.

This activity lets us spend some time understanding and labelling emotions. What does “happy” look like? What does it feel like? When do I feel happy?

With this activity, let’s enable our little one to become an able emoter!

Things You Will Need

Paper
Pair of Scissors
Colour pencils or crayons

Learning Objectives

While you follow the activity, ensure you focus on

Language skills: Name of emotion
Social skills: Recognising other’s feelings
Life skills/ ADL: Expressing emotion, awareness of feelings
Cognitive: Mapping event to emotion

Let's Get Started :)

Watch & follow along with this Activity Video or read the instructions below :)

‍Preparation

Create emotion cards: Graphic + Text
Or use the flashcards we created for your boys and girls

Game on!

Spread the emotion cards on a flat surface, and ask your child to pick one.

Let them try to express the emotion they see on the card. Act out the emotions along with them.

Share a small real-life scenario for better association & comprehension.

Be careful to NOT engage with multiple emotions cards at the same time.

Activity Adaptation & Variations

For older children

Give them blank cards, and allow them to draw emotions.

You may also go beyond the first few emotions - such as Excited, Frustrated, Disappointed, Fearful and Nervous.

While reading out stories, or watching a movie, ask your children to name the emotion they think the characters are feeling.

Fostering emotional development in young children can help them grow into confident and well-balanced adults. You can read more about how to foster emotional growth in children on our blog.