'My voice matters' - support children to name feelings and emotions
We can support children and young people to name feelings and emotions. By helping children connect with how they feel inside their bodies and identify what can help them feel calmer and more grounded, we can enable them to build the tools they need to express themselves. Below are some ideas for fun activities you may like to use.
Feelings Bubbles
Is there an angry way to blow bubbles? Use bubbles to help children take breaths in and out, see who can make the biggest bubble or blow the most bubbles in one go.
Use the bubbles to talk about how some feelings can be big and others small, some come and go quickly, while others hang around. Sometimes more than one feeling can get stuck together and we may need help with this to make them smaller and more manageable.
Handprint Breathing
This is a simple activity that can be done anytime and anywhere and helps children and young people to take time to breathe. Practice this with them, tracing round the shape of their hand with the pointing finger of their other hand, breathing in as they trace up their fingers and thumb and out as they trace down. They may want to do this quickly at first, so encourage them to take their time to breathe slowly.
You could even help them to draw round their hand or make a handprint and then decorate this however they want, to make their own hand breathing picture.
Snow Globes
Use snow globes to help explain how our mind can often get very busy with thoughts and feelings and this makes it difficult to think clearly or remember things. Shake the snow globe up to show the swirl of glitter or snow to represent this and talk about how this may feel. Take some time to take some deep breaths and watch together how the swirl starts to settle to the bottom and then think about what the snow globe looks like now; it is much calmer and the water is clearer. Think about things they can do to help their minds settle so thoughts become clearer and easy to manage.
Using Emojis
Look together at pictures of common emojis and try and identify the emotion in each one.
You could ask older children to tell the story of their day in emojis, either creating a message or drawing pictures to summarise their day. Following this, emojis can also be used to ‘check in’, for example asking, ‘What emoji showed you most for you today?’ or using emojis to show how they are feeling right now.
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