Recognizing Feelings

Emotions are at the core of actions. Kids hit because they are angry or hurt. Kids often misbehave when they feel bored, sad, neglected, or sometimes I think all of us just feel mischievous. Our first lesson for working through conflict without fighting was on recognizing feelings.
Here's the lesson plan:
1. Sing song "If You're Happy and You Know It". We also have the book and CD that we can listen to.
2. Look at books.

• My Many Colored Days--Dr Seuss (a fun look at emotions and colors. This wasn't your typical Dr. Seuss book as far as illustrations and rhyme patterns, but good nonetheless).
• Lots of Feelings--Shelly Rotner (great photographs of kids expressing different emotions. With this book, we talked about things we do with our face and body with different emotions.  For example, when we're angry we might scrunch up our face and make fists with our hands).
• The Way I Feel--Janan Cain (I really liked this book. It had great descriptions of feelings and why you might feel that way. Also, the illustrations were nice).
• How Does Baby Feel?--Karen Katz (very simple and perfect for my one and two year old).
• Glad Monster, Sad Monster--Ed Emberley and Ann Miranda (my boys love monsters so this was great for them. It comes with monster masks, but we got this from the library so the mask saw were long gone).

Some other books you can use:

• Today I Feel Silly and Other Moods that Make My Day--Jamie Lee Curtis (this is a cute book, but for some reason it didn't click with me, so I didn't use it. Maybe I didn't feel like it really captured emotion but was just trying to be silly and/or poetic or maybe it was just out of our realm).
• Feelings--Aliki (a little too advanced for my boys).

After we looked at the books and talked about different feelings, we used paper plates and shapes to make feeling masks. 

Thanks to my friend, Becky, we've been talking a lot about what different feelings look like. Now, when we see someone crying I might point out that the person has tears and a frown so he/she is probably sad. And then we talk about how we can help that person feel better.