We Feel... AWESOME!

Today for our group, I grabbed the wonderful Skillstreaming in Early Childhood book and taught Skill 21: Knowing Your Feelings. This was a great little lesson to practice identifying feelings in a variety of settings and talking about the situations in which we feel certain emotions.

We started by reading Feelings, by Aliki, which is a wonderful book and covers a ton of different feelings. The boys had a hard time getting past "mad, sad, happy," so the book gave us the chance to talk about "nervous, shy, excited" etc. We went page by page, reading each little snippet, pointing out characters and talking about what they're feeling and why. We also discussed times that they felt the same emotion.

After we finished examining the book (and they wanted to go through EVERY character), I had pictures printed off of people and animals showing different emotions. We went through each picture and I had the kiddos make up a little story about why each person or animal was feeling that way, and tell about a time that they felt that way too. It also gave us the opportunity to talk about different synonyms for each feeling (mad: angry, upset, frustrated, etc). Lots of repetition and praising, to the point that their teacher must've thought that we were accomplishing nothing!

My favorite animal photo from group today.

This was a good group today, the boys were on-task with minimal fidgeting. I find that it works really well with such a small group of students to just call them out individually if they're not raising their hands. If they are, then they get chosen and get verbal reinforcement ("D, I love how you raised your hand, thank you"). Next time, we're going to talk about how our body feels when we feel certain emotions, and how we can tell by looking at other people.


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