Lesson Introduction
Besides the standard topics to educate a 5 year old child, there are some other topics I personally find very important to discuss. Especially as our daughter is one of these children (like so many in the world since 2020) that has missed a lot of kindergarten days due to the pandemic.
I think I mentioned it in my introduction post as well, but if not I will do so here, our daughter often falls back into the same response when emotions are build up too quickly. She makes the same weird facial expression and often starts crying as well.
I know that it's probably a lack of understanding that she can show her emotions differently, and certain faces/responses in behavior are linked to certain emotions and that it often doesn't make sense for us to understand what she means. I think it's good for her to learn that feelings are experienced consciously, while emotions manifest either consciously or subconsciously. I will try to explain this to her in an understandable manner.
Creating my own interactive lesson about emotions
While browsing on the web, I found a lot of helpful things to discuss emotions in a fun way, but nothing felt complete to me, so I decided to find inspiration online and create my own interactive lesson about feelings and emotions.
Preparation
While trying to create my own lesson, I did use a feelings chart I found online as I believe this will be a fun way to discuss the different feelings.
As a worksheet, I created my own using Paint software, you can also just draw circles on paper using a pencil.
The circles represent faces with eyes.
During the actual lesson, I will read her a story from one of her favorite books, so for the preparation, I need a book and select a story preferably with enough emotions in there.
This is the one I picked today: The Gingerbread man (reading it from a book with some other famous stories).
The lesson
I will explain first about the different feelings that we can have and that sometimes we don't even realize which one we're feeling. Some of them are very obvious, for example: Happy or Excited, but others can be a bit unclear.
I also explain that we use body language and intonation. During the lesson, I will repeat the emotions and use my body language and intonation to emphasize a certain emotion so she will recognize it easier. I will not yet go into the part where I explain the difference between feelings & emotions, that's for another lesson.
After the introduction using the chart above, I start reading the story I selected. The reason that I'm choosing for this interactive way of teaching is that I hope she can relate to the character in the story.
Every time that the character is happy/sad/scared/mad or surprised I will stop and ask her what kind of emotion this character is feeling.
She had a great time during this lesson and I think that she will soon use emotions in her drawings and paintings as well.
Extra "homework"
I asked her if she could check her dolls and lego figurines if she saw any emotion on their faces. Her conclusion was that every one of them had a happy face. So they are probably happy. As an assignment, I asked her to check dolls and toys in the store if we see them see if all of them have a happy face, or maybe some are different.
I also asked her to try to think for a moment if she's feeling overwhelmed and gets upset/angry and take a deep breathe to figure out if she's really angry or maybe just sad because she didn't get a positive response to a question or something she wanted and we told her no. I will keep an eye out if she's actually trying to practice this, and remind her of it.
Follow up lesson
We'll repeat this lesson a few times with the emotions in the feelings chart first, and read a different story. Every time she can practice drawing the smileys, once she really knows them all, I will create a more in-depth lesson about the topic.
I hope you enjoyed this lesson :)