Create Your Own Feeling Words Book

Jun 26, 201820 min activity

Help your child label and understand different feelings.

As Grover and his friends discover in "The Monster at the End of This Story," monsters can experience different emotions when they hear the same news. Whereas Grover is scared and nervous to meet the monster, Elmo is excited and happy. Elmo thinks he is meeting a new friend! As Grover tells more of his friends about his fear of the monster, they help him realize that it's OK to be afraid and that there are ways he can change his feelings based on what he learned in past experiences.

Helping your child name their feelings is one way to support them in understanding how they react to different situations. When they are able to talk about how they are feeling, they can work on expressing themselves in positive ways, even if they are upset, frustrated, or angry. Make a feeling words book with your child to help them recognize different emotions through pictures and words. Then, review the book together to practice talking about different feelings.

Materials

Paper
Crayons
Pencil

Directions

Talk with your child about times when they have experienced different emotions such as feeling happy, sad, frustrated, or scared. Talk about ways that you help other people feel better, and help your child notice how his behavior affects others. Think about ways that together you can help make people feel good such as creating a card or giving them a hug.

Next, create a book of feeling words and together draw a person next to each word whose face shows that feeling. Remind your child that you can often tell how someone is feeling by looking at their face and body clues such as a smile, hunched shoulders, or furrowed eyebrows.

Then, go through the book together and think of stories for each emotion word. Ask, “Why do you think this person is happy?” and “Why do you think this person is feeling sad? What could you do to make them feel better?”

Explore Further

You and your child can continue the fun by playing a game and acting out different feeling words. To get started, draw or cut out faces from magazines. Glue the faces to small pieces of paper. Then, write the name of an emotion next to each image. Put the pictures in a bag and have your child select one picture to act out! Guess what the feeling is, then switch!

Activity Type

Craft

Topics