Learning About Emotions

Children often have difficulty identifying and expressing their feelings.  Learning what emotions are is a step to managing them effectively in a positive and constructive way. 

This term our team's Inquiry topic has included learning about the emotions each one of us has.  We all have a range of emotions within a day, or even at one time.  I am hoping that encouraging and prompting the children to think about emotions and how we can control them, will help the children be more co operative and appreciate that we are all different.

Although the children have learnt about the school's method of conflict management by "using their WITS" (W - walk away, I - ignore it, T- talk about it and S - seek help) they often do not understand the emotions behind a situation.  Discussing emotions has given children a simple vocabulary to use even if it is just "I'm a little bit angry because...".

Validating their emotions and listening to what a child is saying and how they are saying it,  is helping in many situations.  Talking about it, calms things down.  This does take time but in doing so, it gives the children a model, the words to use, as they learn to solve some of the classroom niggles that crop up.     

These are some simple methods I am trying to use to manage our emotions.  

* be empathetic and talk through the situation

* reassure the child that everyone has emotions and we need to think of positive ways of dealing with them

The children are using these methods

* to ask how their friends are feeling

* giving complements to help a friend feel happy

* do some deep breathing when they need to self calm

* walking away from a situation that makes them unhappy

These are things we often do naturally to calm a situation.  What is different is purposefully modelling and discussing what is happening to a child when they are sad or angry, to acknowledge this and to say it is ok to feel this way and then discussing what steps they can take to resolve the situation.  The children are learning the words to use to navigate social interactions and to be empathetic and forgiving of others. 

We have also learnt to look at body language and facial features.  When reading books together the children are able to point out how characters are feeling.  They comment about sad faces, happy faces, calm faces and so on.  Being able to recognise emotions in someone else is helping them recognise them in themselves.