Monster Feelings

It is important to teach children that their bodies will feel different when they experience different feelings.  Explicitly teaching how their muscles, breathing and facial expressions change can help them understand what a strong feeling is like in their body.  In follow up lessons I will teach them techniques for handling strong emotions.

I typically start off our kindergarten lessons with Ed Emberley's Glad Monster Sad Monster.  This adorable book introduces students to many different feelings and includes masks inside the pages for you to "wear" and show students what the feeling might look like.  Each page describes situations that elicit a specific feeling.  I have students use the clues to guess what emotion will pop up on the next fold-out mask page.

I found free coloring pages of the different feelings expressed in the book that I turned into a mini-coloring books.  After the story each student received their own coloring book to reinforce the feelings we learned about.