Lessons in this theme help children identify and communicate feelings and learn strategies to manage strong emotions. These skills also enhance children’s ability to handle stress, control impulses, and solve problems.

Objective: Children will gain awareness of the wide range and degree of emotions they experience and discuss how a feelings vocabulary can serve as a valuable tool for understanding, controlling, and calming emotions.

Rationale: Learning to identify feelings by name will enable students to better describe how they feel as well as understand the variations in intensity in emotions (for example, generally I am happy, but at special times I am exuberant or joyous). In the course of building a feelings vocabulary, students would also begin to understand the physical and behavioral correlates of specific low and high intensity feelings. This will help students modulate emotions and eventually acquire the ability to be calmer and more confident in navigating social situations and communicating and asserting their feelings and needs.

Having the right words at their disposal is important for children; studies in neuroscience have shown that a feelings vocabulary – having the words to label emotions – helps children express how they feel as well as quiet the mind and increase impulse control.

• Feelings
• Modulate
• Emotions
• Variations
• Degrees
• Express
• Facial expressions
• Body language