Back-to-school time is an excellent opportunity to expand on emotional learning with your child. Understanding their emotions is crucial to social interactions, whether they’re toddlers, preschoolers, or heading to kindergarten.
You might not think of shapes and emotions as related, but shapes are an excellent way for children to explore faces and body language!
Children can use shapes to create faces, draw faces, and even associate shapes and colors with different emotions. Check out the blog at kidsactivities.com for a free printable template and instructions on creating an interactive felt face.
Printable Emotional Learning Activity
Freddy is our adorable bear friend at Kneebouncers, and Rachel at kidsactivities.com came up with a fun way to teach shapes. Freddy’s adorable face! This hands-on activity will have your child giggling as they create unique faces and learn about shapes and emotions.
You can ask them to point to various shapes, count the number of triangles, or have them describe the shapes. If your child has mastered basic shapes, create new ones like stars, diamonds, pentagons, and octagons!
This silly face activity requires only some felt, the face template, and a pair of fabric-cutting scissors. Then, encourage your child to create various faces and expressions for Freddy with the shapes.
Let Creativity Flow!
The best thing about this activity is it is open-ended. So, there is no right or wrong way for your child to play with shapes. Avoid “correcting” your child if they give Freddy three eyes or two noses. Instead, invite them to explain using open-ended questions.
For example, “Can you tell me about Freddy’s face?” or “Why did you decide to put his eyes there?” You may be surprised by your child’s creativity!
I remember when my oldest son was four. He made a butterfly craft with only one eye. When I asked him about it, he said, “Because he is a pirate!” It made perfect sense to him, and who was I to judge his creation?
Other questions you can ask are:
- How would Freddy’s face look if he were happy? Angry? Sad? etc.
- Does your face do the same things as Freddy’s?
- What’s similar about your face and Freddy’s? What’s different?
- What’s an emotion you felt lately? Where did you feel it?
Emotional Learning Tips and Ideas
Talk with your child about what each of the emotions means to them. Place a mirror on the table or nearby so they can practice making faces for each emotion. Read books about emotions and that contain actual photos of faces and body language.
It’s also important to help your child recognize the feelings in their body that accompany each emotion. Ask them where they feel it in their body when they are angry, sad, happy, etc. Everyone feels emotions differently, so don’t assume that just because your face gets hot when you are mad, your child’s does too!
Use words like bubbly, tight, stinging, shaky, wobbly, itchy, hot, cold, heavy, fuzzy, etc., to help describe how emotions feel. For example, you could say, “Let’s clap our hands together really hard. How does that make your hands feel? I feel stingy!” Interoception is learning to understand and interpret the body’s physical signals that tell you when you are hungry or full, happy or sad, hot or cold, scared or calm, etc. Interception is handy for teaching young and neurodivergent children about emotions and sensations.
Experimenting with faces and facial expressions is a safe and silly way for your child to explore emotions! A Little Spot of Emotion by Diane Alber is an excellent tool for teaching young kids about feelings. Kids love the little plush emotion toys, and the color-coded wall poster helps kids learn and name feelings.
Updated September 13, 2024, by L. ELizabeth Forry
