Picture Book About Feelings and a Freebie

Those first crazy weeks of school are upon us.  How are you holding up?

How 'bout your students?

I know my kids tend to have a lot more emotional highs and lows in those first weeks in the classroom. 

Everyone's getting used to each other, the teacher, the classroom, the routine!  Lots of new stuff!

Who could blame them?

So I thought a good book pick for this week's 

Picture Book Pick of the week would be one about emotions.

I'm linking this book pick up with Deanna Jump's 

Book Talk Tuesday series so you may want to take a peek there later, too!

My favourite book about feelings is called,

                   The Way I Feel by Janan Cain 

                   

This is a rhyming book with awesome illustrations.  

It touches on many common feelings such as 

happy

silly

and scared

as well as other more obscure feelings like

 like proud, thankful, and disappointed.

And it's the perfect length for the preschool to Kindergarten crowd.

(Even if I love a book, if I think it's too long for my wiggly group, it doesn't make the cut!)

The final page of the book assures kids that it's okay to have lots of different emotions.

It says, 
"Feelings come and feelings go
I never know what they'll be.
Silly or angry, happy or sad, 
They're all a part of me!"

After reading this book, we usually discuss emotions and how to deal with some of the trickier ones like anger.

I also give the kids a little exercise such as the one below.  

Since my class is preschool age, I scribe their ideas onto the worksheet and then they draw and colour the pictures.

I also created an 8 page Feelings Mini-book similar to this worksheet, but covering more emotions. 
You can see the mini-book and the full Freebie collection in the image below.

If you'd like to download a copy of this set, 
you can scoop it up {here.}  

Have a "happy" week!  :)  

How Can You Encourage Preschoolers to be Empathetic?

With Valentine's Day fast approaching, I thought it was a good time to do a little lesson on

FEELINGS

 I broached the topic by introducing the concept of the Wrinkled Heart.

We begin by talking about how the things we do or say can make people's hearts feel happy or sad.  

Then we brainstorm specific things that could make a heart feel sad or "wrinkled." 

For every idea the children give me, I make a fold in a large paper heart.  Once the heart is filled with folds, I open it up again and we take a look at it.  

We discuss how wrinkled it is now that its feelings have been hurt so many times.   

The students are then asked to say, "Sorry" to the heart like we do when we have hurt a friend's feelings.  

After saying "sorry," we take another look at the heart.  I ask the children if the heart looks any different now that we have said "sorry" to it.  Is it smooth and new looking again?  

No.  Everyone will agree that it is still wrinkled.  

I tell the children that although a wrinkled heart may forgive us, it will not be as new and smooth as before.  We must try our best not to wrinkle it in the first place, and instead do things that will make it happy.    

Here are some of the children's ideas for how to make someone's heart feel happy.

My co-teacher and I follow up this lesson by letting the children know that we will be writing down all of the instances of caring that we see in the classroom this month.  

Here are two of the hearts that we filled out today.  

(Both related to kindness at snack time :))

We displaying our collection of "good deed hearts" on our wall along with our wrinkled and happy hearts.

Here is a close-up of the wrinkled heart lesson that is posted on our wall for parents to read.

We hope to have our wall filled with "good deed" hearts by the end of the month!

If you don't want to miss any ideas and freebies from Teach Easy Resources Blog,

 you can subscribe to receive these posts straight into your e-mail box or by RSS feed.

  Just click on the Subscribe button on the right margin of this blog.