This is a short post to introduce the idea of taking an emotion at a time and exploring it in greater detail. To do this I would start with an ’emotion profile’ (pictured). This can prompt your child/children to really focus on what a particular emotion feels like, what might trigger it and what a person could do to feel even better (if it is an enjoyable emotion) or to manage the emotion resourcefully (if it is an uncomfortable one). This profile can be used to explore different emotions. You could let your child choose which one they would like to explore. Each emotion explored, improves your child’s emotion vocabulary and consequently, emotional intelligence too.
After completing this profile, you could also:
- Try and describe the emotion in your own words.
- Draw a cartoon picture of someone in a situation where they are experiencing the emotion including a speech bubble of what they might say.
- Look up the emotion in the dictionary.
- Look at the images that appear when you type the emotion into a search engine. Which picture do you think represent the emotion most effectively or more simply, which picture do you like best?
- Find other emotion words that are close (or the same) in meaning or that you might feel at the same time as feeling the emotion you are focusing on
- Think of some questions you could ask another person about the emotion. E.g. what is difficult about feeling disappointment? What helps you cope with feeling disappointed? What would make you feel just a little but disappointed and what would make you feel really disappointed? What are the features of a situation that need to be there to cause disappointment?
- Order three to five situations into those that would make you feel the emotion the most to the least. (You could give your child the situations or they could make them up). With the disappointment example: losing a pound coin on the way to the shops, a zoo trip being cancelled because of the weather, expecting your favourite tea but getting your least favourite etc
- Create an advice poster for someone dealing with that emotion.
- Consider the last week, was there a time when you felt this emotion?
- More abstractly – decide what the emotion might look like, taste like, smell like, sound like and feel like (if it could be experienced this way).
If you wish for a copy of this emotion profile and a list of emotions to choose from, message me and I will email them to you.
I had a go at creating a profile for worry.
