Skill: Knowing Your Feelings

In order for children to gain control of their behavior when they are experiencing strong feelings, they must know how to identify their feelings. It is never too early to talk to children about feelings or to help them see the link between feelings and behavior. Linking these together demonstrates how our feelings can affect the choices we make, and it can also improve children's self-control.

Teach children these steps for problem solving:

1. THINK about what happened.

2. THINK of how your body feels. (It will be necessary to review several basic feeling words with young children to help them identify some ways our body tells us how we are feeling. Help the children notice that some body cues signal different feelings.)

3. RECOGNIZE the feeling.

4. SAY, "I feel ______."

Identifying Feelings Activity: Young children can learn a variety of words to use to describe different feelings.

Directions:

1. Tell your child that you want to talk about feelings and how we can get messages from the way our body behaves. These messages tell us how we feel about experiences. (Ex. If you win a game you might smile and laugh. If someone says something mean you might cry.)

2. Ask your child to provide examples of his own feelings. "Can you tell me about a time you felt happy? Sad? Angry?" (Limit examples to three or four.)

3. Next, ask your child to name as many feelings as she can, and to decide if each is a comfortable (e.g., happy, excited, joyful, proud) or an uncomfortable (e.g., angry, sad, embarrassed) feeling. You can use a chalkboard or paper to list feelings in two columns.

4. Ask, "How do you show you are happy, sad, angry, scared, etc.?"

5. Use the following situations to act out with your child (you can use puppets as above):

• Your class is going to receive an extra recess because they did a great job on their spelling test! [artwork, music, reading, etc.]
  
• You made a drawing and your older brother (sister) tells you that "you can't draw."
  
• You just heard a friend say that anyone wearing a blue shirt is "stupid."

Ideas for discussion during role playing: Use these questions to help your child think about appropriate choices and behaviors in the role plays above:

• When you have comfortable feelings, how might you show them to other people? (e.g., smile, laugh, hug, act friendly)
  
• How do you think other people feel when we show our comfortable feelings?
  
• When you have uncomfortable feelings, how might you show them to other people? (e.g., yell, frown, blush, cry)
  
• How do you think other people feel when we show our uncomfortable feelings?
  
• How do you think expressing our feelings might help us get along better with one another? (e.g., understand each other and our differences, communicate better, resolve conflicts better, and share in each other's excitement more frequently.)

Another activity: Using familiar short stories, ask your child to draw pictures that illustrate how the main characters feel. Select stories that include a variety of feelings.

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