Little Emotions

Feelings Wheel

Emotional development is an essential and often forgotten part of childhood development. A child's emotional development is just as important as any of their other areas of development. We have a tendency to forget that children experience emotions exactly the same as adults. They are at a disadvantage though because they often don't understand them or lack the language to accurately express and discuss them.

We need to teach our children how to identify, name and cope with their emotions (both positive and negative) — it's one of the most important things we can do for them.

Instructions

This is a very simple and effective emotional check-in activity using a "feelings wheel". It's a good idea to do it at the beginning and end of each day. You can combine this activity with other check-ins that you may already do (for example, days of the week, weather etc.). It's also handy to do a check-in if you feel like everyone is spiralling a little and it would be beneficial to stop and all take stock. What is important is that everybody in the family does it. It works best if it is led by the parents sharing how they feel first.

  • Start by making everyone in the family a token/marker. It needs to be something small and simple that can be moved around the emotion wheel each time you do a check-in. This gives your kids visual input of their emotions and teaches them awareness of others (for example, Dad's token is the yellow one and he is feeling tired this morning). To make the token, cut out a small piece of paper into whatever shape you want, colour each person's in a different colour and put a piece of prestick on the back. If you don't have prestick you could use sticky notes, pins or fridge magnets — in this case put the emotion wheel on a pin board or the fridge. It's a good idea to get everyone involved in choosing and making their token.
  • The feelings wheel can be downloaded from the PDF or you can draw one out and then decorate it together. If you can't be bothered with any of that admin, just search for a printable feelings wheel online.
  • When you make/organise the feelings wheel and tokens for each person, have a discussion around feelings and why it's important to understand and express them. Use the feelings wheel and read off some of the emotions and discuss them. It is often useful to link emotions to behaviours (for example: when I'm happy, I laugh; when I'm sad/tired, I cry). For younger children (pre-school) it's good to keep it very concrete and on the first ring of basic emotions. For older children, you can encourage them to identify basic emotions and help them to expand on them (for example, instead of angry, they may be frustrated). Parents, be honest with how you feel and make use of the more abstract emotion words to label your feeling. You can also ask your kids to tell you how they think you are feeling.
  • If there's a very little kid (a baby or toddler) in the house with no or limited language, let the older kids identify how they might be feeling. This creates awareness of others and assists your children in learning how to identify and label all kinds of emotions — and can be pretty funny too.

Here is a great song and kids video which explains emotions: Watch on YouTube