Craft Lesson #4: My Many Colored Days

Identifying Emotions

Targeted age Group:
First Grade

Introduction:
Everyone has emotions and everyone feels different emotions every day. I, personally, believe that it is critical for a person’s well being to be able to identify their own emotions. It sounds simple to say, identify your emotions, but it isn’t simple at all. Emotions are complex and to better understand our selves we need an understanding of our emotional self. This is a wonderful lesson for children to learn because they will use emotion recognizing skills the rest of their lives.

How to teach it:
Before reading the book, My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss, I would ask the students what they think the word “emotion” means. I would ask them to tell me some emotions they know. After reading the book acknowledging the emotions that they may have previously mentioned when we come across them I would then go back over the book page by page with the class discussing each emotion. I would ask students to take turns acting out the emotion or telling me what makes them feel that emotion.

Then I would have worksheet with a circle on it with pie shaped sections drawn within the circle already. The children can color or cut and paste different colored construction paper into each of the pie shaped sections. Then write or draw the emotion that each color represents on the colored sections. I would laminate them then have the children attach a laminated arrow with a brad to the circle. To use what they have made they simply point the arrow to the emotion they are feeling. They can keep their “emotion-meter” in or on their desk every day and can use it to identify in a concrete way their feelings and emotions.

Resources:

Seuss, Dr. My Many Colored Days. Illus. Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher. New York: Random House, 1996.