Teaching Kids to Identify Emotions

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura from youngwritersworkshops.com, and I'm going to talk about how to teach kids to identify their emotions. Something really helpful to know is that when children have a large vocabulary of feeling words, they actually have a better ability to express their feelings and they're more successful in doing so, which is just a really important thing for helping kids to solve problems and to resolve conflict. One of the ways that you can begin to teach them this is just to show them faces and talk about the feeling that accompanies these faces. Also, encourage them to act out the feeling while they're learning what this face is showing. They can demonstrate someone who feels that way. That way, they'll begin to be able to connect the feeling with a label for it. And the more that they can begin to establish this connection, the more that they'll be able to identify their own feelings or someone else's feelings and then to address them properly. There are several games that you can play that will help them in this process. One of the games is a bingo game with faces. So, for example, the bingo card might have faces showing different emotions. When you pull the cards out, they have to identify the label for this face. For example, an angry face; they have to know that it's angry to match what's on the card and then also act it out. They have to show someone who's angry, how that looks. So this game can help them to begin to identify feelings. You might also use puppets where they do role play. There could be an angry puppet and a sad puppet and a frightened puppet. And these puppets can show - can demonstrate what some of the behaviors are that are connected with the different emotions and give kids a chance to act things out that aren't maybe appropriate in everyday situations, but they're able to have a cathartic way to demonstrate some of those emotions. You can also bring out emotions during story time. While reading, you might ask what a certain character is feeling, and ask them how they know that; give them a chance to describe how they are deciphering that emotion and that way they can begin to look for - they can start to be able label emotions - that are in stories that will help them to also be able to do that in life. A really good resource for this study is the Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning. That organization has some really good materials available on their website, so a really good place to look for more information. So those are some ideas about how to teach kids to identify their feelings."