Teaching Emotions In The Classroom

Teaching Emotions in the Classroom

Many times, if young children are unable to act empathetic towards their siblings, friends, and classmates, it is not because they do not feel empathy, it issimply because they do not havethe correct vocabulary to communicate their emotions.
Teaching children emotional vocabulary is a key part of conflict education at a young age. For a group activity, askchildren: “What does feeling happy feel like? Look like? What color is it? What animal is a happy animal? What does feeling angry feel like? Look like? What color is it? What animal is an angryanimal? How do we act when we are happy? When we are angry? How do we treat otherpeople?” Act these feelings and actions out in role-play, and role-play alternative responses.
One teacher offour-year-olds was having trouble with arguments and fighting in her class. She felt that she had to address the problem directly with the entire group, as well as individually, if she was to see consistentresults. She writes this about her experience:
This year in the Pre-K class we began by identifying feelings. We talked about how various situations make us feel. Our goal is to encourage the children touse words to express feelings and thus to avoid some confrontations and conflicts. One activity to encourage talking about feelings was the following: Each child made stick puppets whose facesreflected basic emotions (happy, sad, mad). We discussed various situations (when a friend hurts you, when you have pizza for lunch, when a parent is sick, when you spend time with a grandparent…) and thechildren used the puppets to display how they would feel.
As a follow-up to this, we now have the children express their feelings, following a conflict, come up with a solution, shake hands to show theyagree with it, and plan how to implement the solution. For example, following a physical argument between two children, they talked about why they were pushing and what they could do to make each...