Feelings Throw

Activity Overview

In order to build our emotional competence, children need to understand that we all experience a wide range of feelings and that all of our feelings are okay! Language is a powerful tool to identify, understand, and work with feelings. Developing a tool belt of effective strategies to regulate feelings is a goal of early childhood programs. In this activity, we give students opportunities to discuss their feelings, figure out what their body and mind need to regulate those feelings, then physically toss their feelings into a bucket! Have fun with it, make a few baskets, and get to know yourselves!

What You Need

• Bucket or basket

• Various items to be thrown into the bucket (rolled up socks, stuffed animals, soft toys)

• Feeling cards

• Tape

Steps

1. Gather the materials and place the basket or bucket in the center of a room. This is the “We Feel Better Bucket.”

2. Assign a feeling to each of the items – happy, sad, cranky, silly, scared, sleepy, shy, excited, frustrated, mad. Tape printed out feeling cards on each of the items.

3. Go through each item and its associated feeling individually. Before throwing it into the bucket, ask the student guiding questions to help understand and build skills to regulate their feelings. Model some examples so the student understands the activity.

4. The importance of this exercise is that students get to identify feelings, explain times when they felt certain ways, work through them with a trusted grown-up, hear some ways to feel better, and toss their resolved feelings in the bucket to feel better.

Guiding Questions

• How does it feel to be happy? What does it look like?

• What does being sad look like? How can we feel better?

• What about if you’re cranky? How does it feel? What does it look like? How can you feel better?

• Were you silly today? What does being silly look like? What happens when you’ve gotten all your sillies out?

• Have you ever felt scared before? What does it look like? What could you do to not be scared?

• When are you sleepy? What do you do when you’re sleepy? And when you wake up how do you feel?

• What does it look like to be shy? How can we become braver?

• When you’re excited what do you feel like?

• Have you ever been frustrated? How did that feel?

• What does being mad look like? How can we feel better?

Extensions

• What other feelings do you feel in your body? Loved? Jealous? Confused? Apprehensive?

• Create your own feelings cards and continue the activity