14 ACTIVITIES TO WORK ON EMOTIONS (CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS) - ECONOMÍA - 2024

In this article we show you activities to work on emotions with your children or students, we explain what they are, the most common emotions and why it is important to work on them during childhood.

The concept of emotional intelligence is quite modern. It includes the ability to properly recognize and manage our emotions, which makes it especially useful for success in both personal and professional life.

An emotionally intelligent person will be able to recognize the emotions they have and what is causing them, in addition to knowing how to properly govern them, having self-control and a good capacity for motivation.

Emotional intelligence is important for day-to-day life, to know how to cope with school or work stress, to know how to negotiate and resolve conflicts, to be able to perform much more in the academic or work environment or to know how to work in a team.

14 activities to work on emotions

1- The dictionary of emotions

The dictionary of emotions and feelings can be a fun activity to do as a family. As if it were a traveling book, and as a work of reflection and emotional deepening, we will ask the children to take the dictionary home each week.

For this activity to succeed and be profitable, we need the collaboration of the families, so the first step will be to contact them and ask them to be part of the emotions project.

In this way, each week a child will take the dictionary home and choose a different emotion with his family. It is about defining that emotion, drawing it, indicating its symptoms, the biological meaning it has, in what situations it appears, how could it be an adequate management of that emotion, an inappropriate one….

The more information they provide, the richer the dictionary will be. Once in class, each child will be able to expose the emotion that they have worked on in class and a debate can be opened among all about that emotion.

It can be a very interesting activity because it favors the vocabulary of emotions and as the activity progresses, emotions will emerge beyond the basic ones that can greatly enrich the emotional literacy of children.

2- The book of joy or The book of emotions

Through this activity we intend to bring children closer to the emotion of joy and that they can generate a resource to approach when they do not feel so well to remember events that at the time generated them joy.

This activity is useful because it allows us to adapt to the characteristics and age of each child. In this way, to make the book we can use colored sheets and different stationery material (markers, crayons, pencils…), in addition to anything we want to decorate.

It would be interesting to start the book of joy at the beginning of the course, so that students have the entire course of the book and can capture in it all the joyful things that happen to them in their daily lives.

Any activity that makes the child happy can be in the book: from visiting the movies or the zoo, to bathing or playing with his brother.

To work on emotional literacy in depth, we will ask the child to add a sentence below each drawing where they write “I am happy because….”.

A variant of this work is to do "The book of emotions." We can work on the different emotions in the classroom and add the rest of the emotions in the book: sadness, anger, disgust…

We will ask the child, in the same way, to write down the different situations that produce these emotions and the reason why they are in this way. Once the child has mastered it, we can add the consequence, that is, what she does once that emotion has occurred.

This book can be very useful for the child to become aware of the situations that precede what he thinks, the emotion that that thought produces in him and how he acts afterwards, so that it is easier in this way to correct the inappropriate behaviors that he may have, helping him to have a better emotional management.

3- The jar of calm

The pot of calm can be a useful activity to deal with anger and also the stress or nervousness that children present in different situations.

It is a manual activity that we can do with children. For this, we do not need more than an empty bottle to which we are going to add liquid and glitter. You can add several tablespoons of glue and also coloring if you want the liquid of some color.

Its function is to shake the bottle when the child needs to calm down and its benefits can be used from the beginning.

4- The biological function of emotions

We can work with the students the six basic emotions: joy, sadness, fear, disgust, anger and surprise. And since they are basic, they have biological significance and a universal characteristic facial pattern.

In this way, we will be able to search for information by distributing the class into six groups and giving each of them one of the basic emotions. We will ask you to find information about that emotion and what its biological significance may be.

They should then present it to the class. It is an activity that must be carried out with older children, since the content of the activity is complex.

5- Work emotions with cards

Working on emotions on a day-to-day basis is the most useful, but preparing cards where emotions are present and can reflect on them can bring us many advantages.

In this way, we can prepare cards with the different emotions and we will give them so that they are able to solve them.

These cards can range from faces where they have to guess what the emotion is behind, vignettes where they have to elaborate the story, underline from a list of options those situations where he feels that emotion (for example, things that scare you or that make you disgusting).

You can add sentences that are true and false sentences about each emotion to see to what extent they understand them, elaborate sentences where they have to fill the gap with emotions… there are many options, you just have to be a little creative!

6- The recipe for emotions

An activity that admits different variants is the recipe for emotions. It is about making a recipe, as if it were cooking, but with different emotions.

To do this, we can either design a recipe where the ingredients are the different emotions, or choose a single emotion and ask the children to design a recipe where the final result is the emotion we want to work on.

7- The emotional box

One of the activities that we can do with our children or with our students is the “emotional box”. For this, it is necessary that we have a box, which can be made of cardboard, plastic or whatever we find that may be useful.

A previous activity could be to decorate the box that will be used to work on emotions, so that the students become more involved in the activities that we will carry out with it.

Once we have the box ready, we can ask the children to make cards with the emotions. When we work on emotional intelligence or emotions, one of the fundamental aspects is emotional literacy.

We must ensure that children have a great knowledge and a great vocabulary about emotions. To do this, we can first do awareness and knowledge activities about emotions.

When students already have a more or less extensive vocabulary about emotions, they will be ready to do this activity. Obviously, it can be adapted to different characteristics and ages, so that, depending on whether they have a greater or lesser capacity, we can make more or less cards.

The purpose of the box is to be able to have a place where children express the different emotions they have throughout the day.

In this way, we will ask the students to make a card with the name of the emotion in different situations that cause them emotions and to draw a picture that represents it, in addition to indicating what happened.

We must place the emotional box somewhere where the child can see it and can access it whenever he needs it.

In this way, at the end of the week, in the assembly with the children, we will be able to take out the box and work among all the situations that have taken place in the classroom, what emotions are behind, how they have been managed and if they could have been carried out otherwise.

8- The jar of positive news

A fun activity that can be done by all ages is the Good News Jar. It is an activity that helps us to work joy with children.

To do this, every time any joyous event occurs in the children (anything that for them is cause for joy and that they want to share), it will be written on a piece of paper and put in a jar that we will have in class for that purpose..

A good time to collect the different positive news can be the assembly, once a week. In this way, once the agreed time has passed (it may be at the end of the term), we will sit down together and take out the jar of news.

We will read and remember those situations that made us happy once and with all of them, we will make a mural that we will share with the families.

9- The emotional tale

An activity that can be useful to work on the different emotions is to ask them to design a story, a story, where the main character goes through different adventures and different situations where the different emotions take place.

For this, we can offer you a list with the different emotions that we want to work on and we will ask you to develop your imagination and creativity to develop the story.

It can be interesting because they must stop to think and reflect on each of these emotions, in what situations we interpret and have those emotions and what things happen next.

We will thus be working on the different competencies of emotional intelligence.

10- Riddles of emotions

Riddles with emotions can help us teach children to distinguish the most important characteristics of emotions.

Although we can encourage children, according to their age and maturity level, to invent riddles themselves, if we want to work deeply on the characteristics of emotions, it is best if we invent them ourselves.

To do this, you can take the facial characteristics, the function of each of the emotions, the situations, the physical feeling that they produce in us… any of them will be useful and will help children!

11- What are you afraid of?

This dynamic allows us to work fear with children. To do this, we will first work on fear and give some example situations where we can be afraid.

Next, we will ask the children to think about situations where they are or have been afraid. We will ask them to write it down and share it with a partner.

We will write it down on sticky papers and one by one we will comment on them aloud, inviting students to show what they are afraid of, what they feel when they are afraid, etc.

To work on fear (and emotions in general) it is important to attend to the physical signals of emotions (what I feel) and distinguish them from the emotional part of the emotion (how I feel). This is important in order to achieve a good job in all areas of emotional intelligence.

In addition, the competences of emotional intelligence happen because the person is also able to identify the physical signals that our own body produces and that warn us of the emotion that is behind.

12- The memory of emotions

A memory of emotions can be done with children. In this way, we can make the memory ourselves or we can ask the children to draw the pictures that will later be used to carry out this activity.

It is about making “pairs of cards” with the same emotion (two identical cards that reflect a face with fear, another two that reflect a face with surprise, joy, anger, sadness and disgust).

For basic emotions we can use faces, so that we help children to work on identifying and understanding emotions. When children are young, we can work with only these six emotions.

If we consider that with these 12 cards the game is already too simple, we can add as many emotions as we want, and since facial expression is not what designates secondary emotions, we can draw situations that reflect those secondary emotions.

Once we have done the game, it is about shuffling the cards (if we laminate them they will be much better) and putting them on the table face down. In turn, each child picks up one of the cards and discovers the emotion behind it, to later look for the other card that designates the emotion. In this way, in addition to working on emotions, we will be exercising memory.

If we also want to make a variant of this game, we can make, on the one hand, one of the cards with the name of the emotion, the face… and the other card with a situation or anything else that reflects the same emotion.

This would be a useful activity to do with older children than the previous game may be too easy for them.

13- The dice of emotions

The dice of emotions can be used to play a number of games. It is about making a dice and on each side we put one of the basic emotions: joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear and surprise.

Once we have it done and decorated (remember, facial emotion may be the most useful to represent it, but if you find it too complicated you can do it simply with the word), we can do many different activities.

One of them may be to invent stories or phrases where the child has to use this emotion. Thus, in turns, the dice is thrown and with the emotion that has come out we can invent a story.

Or we can encourage the children to roll the die and mimic a situation where that emotion is expressed. Or that they are able to argue and find in which situations in their daily life they have felt that emotion.

We can also work out which would be the inappropriate strategies to manage those emotions or which would be the appropriate ones. The dice can offer us many opportunities and with a little imagination, it can be a very useful and fun game.

14- The domino of emotions

With the domino of emotions we can also have a fun time and it can be very useful to work with children on emotions. We can encourage the children to make their own dominoes or we can make a domino together.

To do this, the first thing will be to plan what the chips will be like. You, as an adult, must first design a "standard card", as are dominoes, which are white (with two overlapping squares may be enough).

Once done, you print the blank tiles the size you want to make the dominoes and design together with the students the different cards with the emotions (we can put the names, facial expressions, situations…).

Once it is done, it is about playing dominoes based on emotions.

Why is it important to work on emotions in childhood?

Emotions are constantly present in any situation that children experience (and that we adults experience). Both at home, at school, with friends… emotions are always with us.

Children are constantly involved in emotional exchanges. This makes it especially important to learn to detect and manage emotions properly.

Although there is a belief that emotions are "innate" and that many times we cannot do anything to control them, the truth is that emotional intelligence is a learned construct and that it can (and should) be taught.

Parents and teachers have a great task ahead of us in this regard. Studies say that personal and professional success depends, to a large extent, on the emotional intelligence that the person has.

Emotional intelligence involves helping to detect, understand, and properly manage emotional states, but also help the child develop self-control, self-motivation, social skills, empathy or assertiveness.

References

1. Spanish Association Against Cancer. Emotions: understand them to live better.
2. Madrid's community. Emotional intelligence: the secret to a happy family.
3. Goleman, D. Emotional intelligence.
4. Greenberg, L. (2002). Emotions: an internal guide, which ones I follow and which ones I don't.
5. Persian, L. (2016). Emotional intelligence Libsa.
6. Vallés Arándiga, A. (2009). The emotional intelligence of parents and children. Pyramid.