Feelings – Diary of a First Child

Well, the best laid plans, and all that! I’d intended to post every day for 30 days, sharing our #30dayswild journey, but yeah, life happens, doesn’t it. Never mind, new goal: post when I can! So far so good!

Last year the girls and I spent some time on Feelings And Emotions, learning about different emotions, what they feel like, how they make us act and so on. It was a very good series of activities, and they still refer back to it. I decided for one of last week’s #30dayswild activities to go back to one of those activities, a printout of leading questions I designed to make the girls identify how being in specific places makes them feel. (Find that activity and printout here.) Nature Can Improve Mental Health

As they change and grow, I think it’s useful to revisit some activities because it shows them and me how much they have developed on the inside too.

Exploring how being in different places makes us feel. #knowingme #30dayswild #beach #iow #isleofwight #feelingsandemotions “On the beach I feel refreshed and happy. Its a good place to come when I’m feeling blue” http://bit.ly/Exploringfeelings
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The questions on this sheet of paper are leading questions, about how we feel in different places:

“On the beach, with the waves at my feet, my toes in the sand, I feel…. ”

“In the forest, with the trees overhead, and the birds chirping, I feel…”

and then there are questions about a shopping centre and their own bedroom.

(Words on the actual page vary a bit, but you get the idea.

Using these questions on the printed sheet gave us the opportunity for some quiet reflection. In the forest, for example, we closed our eyes, described what we could feel on our skins, smell in the air, taste on the air, hear… and the same on the beach.

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I was pleased to find that Ameli’s questions have grown from ‘makes me want ice cream’ to something along the lines of “On the beach I feel refreshed and happy. Its a good place to come when I’m feeling blue”. Similarly, her response to the forest was “In the forest I feel at home.”

I think it’s really valuable to be able to identify how specific places feel, so that they can use their environment to help manage their emotions.

I know I’m feeling really irritable and ‘scratchy’ at the moment, so we’ve decided to camp at a local campsite this week. I know that waking under canvas for a few days will improve the way I feel. I hope that my children can identify where nature contributes to their general mental health too.

Learning About Feelings And Emotions

Home / 4-5 / Learning About Feelings And Emotions

October 3, 2016September 29, 2016 by Luschka

Our first ‘theme’ for the new academic year – such as it is for those of us who learn at home – has been Feelings and Emotions, borne from a few things happening in our family, and a number of occasions where Ameli (6) has said that she can’t explain her feelings, and general outburst of anger from Aviya (4).

I’m never entirely sure how much of what we discus is ‘sinking in’ with the girls, so it’s always rewarding in the days and weeks that follow an activity to see the children refer back to it, or change behaviour based on it. While this theme wasn’t particularly academically approached, more with arts and crafts and fun activities, it was still influential, with both girls coming out of it with a greater ability to ‘use your words’ rather than just shouting.

I chose a range of activities for this week, including foods, crafts, games and activities:

Food

We had two food based activities this week. The first was simple pancakes with fruity faces. You can use any recipe you prefer, and add fruit like blueberries for eyes, bananas or strawberries for a nose and clementines for smiley or sad faces.
Read more: Learning About Feelings And Emotions

Face & Feelings Matching Game

Home / 4-5 / Face & Feelings Matching Game

September 16, 2016September 13, 2016 by Luschka

I have a whole drawer full of printed games and puzzles and activities that I can pull out whenever we need something to change the narrative on our day. One of the activities that I recently added to this collection was a faces & feelings matching game (download it free here). I printed it and laminated it and keep them for a quick, five minute activity from time to time.

You can do it either way – lay out the faces and match the words, or lay out the words and match the faces to them. There are more words than faces because some faces can match a variety of words – like terrified and yelling.

You can either pull out extra words so that you can focus on the words you’re interested in, or you can leave it as is.

Five “About Me” Questions For Children

Home / 4-5 / Five “About Me” Questions For Children

September 15, 2016September 9, 2016 by Luschka

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a new friend, Donna Jones Mbe. Donna worked with ‘at risk’ and vulnerable teenagers in Sheffield for 31 years, so when it comes to talking about feelings and emotions, she was a font of information and ideas of how to have a meaningful session with the children. One of the activities Donna recommended was to lay each child on a roll of paper and draw an outline around their forms. As it turned out on the day, we didn’t have enough paper on our long IKEA roll, but we did have little person-shaped-foams*, and I decided to use those. Read more: Five “About Me” Questions For Children

Cast Away Worries On A Worry Boat

Home / 4-5 / Cast Away Worries On A Worry Boat

September 14, 2016September 13, 2016 by Luschka

This week, on Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday, we combined Matilda’s boats and our feelings and emotions themes and made paper boats, which we set free on the ocean.

I’ve always been particularly fixated on the line from the Matilda movie

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea.”

I guess it speaks to what’s always been my attraction to the ocean – the freedom, the weightlessness of water, a whole world of separate reality.

The kids have had some difficult news this week, so I’m very conscious of their feelings and fears right now – more than they seem to be, since they need some prompting about things that they may be worried or upset about. Never the less, identifying your worries and setting them free is a useful skill to have, and one well-started in childhood.

There are many tutorials on-line on how to fold a paper boat, so I won’t remake the wheel, but instead will share one here from Big Enough Umbrella as I found it the easiest to follow: Read more: Cast Away Worries On A Worry Boat

Easy ‘Feelings’ Stress Balls

Home / 4-5 / Easy ‘Feelings’ Stress Balls

September 13, 2016September 9, 2016 by Luschka

Carrying on with our emotions and feelings theme, we made balloon-stress balls with faces on them for the different major emotions.

We started off filling the balloons with oats, but after a couple decided to do it without – I could just see the living room filled with oats! – and decided instead to only blow the balloons up a small bit – about a quarter of their capacity. This gives them a lot of room to stretch which means they can still squish and squeeze it.

Read more: Easy ‘Feelings’ Stress Balls

Printable Emotional Animals Game

Home / 4-5 / Printable Emotional Animals Game

September 12, 2016September 9, 2016 by Luschka

I really enjoy game cubes – I’ve made a few of them over the course of parenting, like this activity cube for rainy days – and was going to make one for animals & emotions to go with our feelings and emotions theme, but then happened across this printable version on Twinkl. I decided to save my wooden blocks for another time, and printed this emotional animals game instead.

Using Beads To Show How Feelings Affect Life

Home / 4-5 / Using Beads To Show How Feelings Affect Life

September 9, 2016September 9, 2016 by Luschka

We’re talking about feelings and emotions at the moment, because both seem to be running high with my four-going-on-fourteen and six-going-on-sixteen year olds. Sometimes its hard to know what really sinks in, but this evening as we were climbing into bed, my youngest was becoming shouty, then stopped herself and said “Mommy, I’m feeling sadness” – the sadness was about going to bed, which was promptly ended by falling asleep, but it was progress, still!

I saw a picture of window charms made from melting beads somewhere recently, and it struck me as a good way of showing how different emotions and feelings can be amassed in a melting pot to make a life – spend the majority of your days angry, and you’ll have an angry life. Spend the majority of your days joyful and you’ll have a joyful life. (With the obvious exception of mental health concerns.) I wanted to demonstrate this visually.

First I rummaged around for a variety of beads and poured them into a muffin case and labelled each colour on the tin.

In our example I used white for happiness, pink for joy, light blue for sadness, dark blue for anger, dark pink for fear and orange for disgust – these being the six major emotions. Read more: Using Beads To Show How Feelings Affect Life

Diary of a First Child

Tag: Feelings

Identifying Where Nature Can Improve Your Mental Health #30DaysWild