From Watching to Wondering: Easing Into Feelings
Small openings, BIG possibilities
Earlier this month, I wrote about working with students on complex feelings. 😖 I got some emails asking for tips working with students who are working on foundational feelings, like mad, sad, worried, and happy.
How can clinicians get students in their social groups more comfortable talking about feelings?
Well, here come some tips!! 📝
We all have students in our caseload who aren’t quite ready to talk about their uncomfortable feelings. They may say they don’t have any, or “draw a blank” when you ask them to think of a time when they felt sad, mad, or worried.
They just aren’t ready.
With these students, a great place to start can be… terrific animations.📽️ Carefully chosen selections that can let them watch and dip their toes into characters experiencing discomfort as a first step to thinking about their own feelings.
I often start with the feeling angry.
I find it’s a bit less threatening than sad and worried. In one of my groups, we watched four terrific animations.
After we watched each one, I asked them to name all the “angry” feelings they noticed. 😠 I was AMAZED by the list they came up with – such a richness of emotional vocabulary!!! WOW! And this from students who hesitated to name any angry feelings of their own:
How about another feeling the following session?
We tried sad next. 😞 We watched three terrific animations. After we watched each one, I asked them to name all the “sad” feelings they noticed. Again, they did great. They were actually starting to enjoy the task – I think they knew they could do it!
Here’s what they came up with:
The animations we watched were:
Embarked, by Mikel Mugica, Adele Hawkins & Soo Kyung Kang
Maca and Roni: Glasses for Cuties, by Kyungmin Woo
They enjoyed talking about these animations, in fact, the question that arose (and got discussed) organically was: How does sadness sometimes lead us (in our discussion, the characters,) to action? Nice!!
As you explore feelings with your students, you can do more than just expand vocabulary.
To demonstrate how much and how quickly feelings change, we can track the feelings of a character. With a student I see individually, we each used a Feelings Tracker to follow a different character in Maca & Roni: Jenga, by Kyungmin Woo.
OK, so I knew to assign him to the character with a lot more emotional flux (hmmm, can you figure out which one that was above?)
Here’s one last activity. ✍🏼
Use feeling cards or Kimochis, and attach them to the screen when you freeze the action. You can also use regular stickie notes with feeling labels drawn or written on them. My second-grade group loved digging through my Kimochis bowl of feelings, attaching them to the screen, and then taking a photo.
We want to make feelings, even those uncomfortable ones, fun!! 😁
Sesame Street: Ernie Counts Fruit
If you try any of these, I’d love to hear how it goes!
Until next time, sending you warm wishes.
