What is Emotion Works?

Emotion Works is a colourful education programme designed to help children learn emotional language, develop emotional understanding and manage feelings and emotional behaviours.

This programme is used throughout our school, from Nursery to Primary 7, to ensure our children are happy, settled and confident and ready to learn.

Emotion Works is an educational programme that puts learning at the heart of emotional health and well-being.

This is the 'Cog Model' that the programme is based on.

It breaks the topic of emotion down into 7 different parts but also shows how they all fit together to help children to learn how 'emotions work'

EARLY LEVEL

With our youngest children we focus on building and developing emotional language.

We encourage children to think about other emotions; moving on from just ‘happy’ or ‘sad’.

FIRST LEVEL

Our next step would then be to explore the yellow cog; looking at various triggers/causes for different emotions. We use stories, films, music, art and daily situations to discuss these. The red cog encourages us to think about how the emotion makes us feel inside i.e. butterflies in our tummy, feeling hot, shaky or sweaty etc.

The green cog is the behaviour cog. This looks at what do we do to show how we are feeling? What actions, facial expressions movements? Is this behaviour okay, and if not what could we do instead? This cog is important as we need to ensure our children are expressing their emotions in healthy and safe ways.

The blue cog is our regulation strategy. Here we explore what strategies we could use to cheer up or calm down if the emotion we are experiencing is a negative one.

Different children will have different strategies. This may take some time to find what works for our children.

SECOND LEVEL

The grey cog focuses on the intensity of the emotion i.e. on a scale of 0-10 how happy are you? A little or a lot.

The purple cog is the influences cog where we look at the wider context, thinking about if there is anything significant about the situation or the person involved. Both of these cogs can be trickier for some of our children to understand which is why we look at these last, usually around Primary 7.