How Do I Feel When - Emotion Sorting Activity

We have been trying to teach Bubble how to connect events throughout her day with her feelings, and then to be able to verbalise them. We often ask her how she feels about certain things especially if we can see a strong emotion that we can 'use', such as when she is obviously happy or sad (IE: when she is upset about not getting her own way we might say "I can see that you feel sad").
This game is an extension of that event/emotion connection and also a way to hopefully expand on Bubble's verbal skills and story telling. I drew her 'story' cards by hand because we had no ink in our printer but they could easily be made using found images on the net or using photos.

WE USED:

* Cardboard (we used note taking cards)
* Textas/Pencils/Printer/Photos
* Small bowls or boxes for sorting
* Sticky Tape

I made story cards based on real things that have caused certain emotions for Bubble. To begin with we are focusing on 'happy, 'sad' and 'angry' but will add other emotion categories later like 'jealous', 'confused', 'scared/frightened' etc...

I then drew very basic symbols to represent each of the emotions and used tape to stick them to some sorting boxes.

Bubble then sorted each of the story cards into the emotion box she felt it should go into. We used the prompt card each time and read it like a story.

I wasn't sure how Bubble would go with this activity but she really enjoyed it and took a long time to think about and choose her emotion box for each story card. I was quite surprised by some of her choices!

After she had finished sorting her cards Bubble wanted to play again, so we switched it around and she made her own set of cards to sort. She found this task really difficult and needed a lot of prompting to come up with ideas, but it was a great way to get her thinking about how certain things made her feel.