DID YOU KNOW...?

Design by emma ugarelli

​Children with emotional education build a healthy sense of self-awareness, tolerate frustration better, get into fewer fights, and engage in less self-destructive behaviour than children who do not have a strong foundation. These children are also healthier, less lonely, less impulsive, and more focused, and they have greater academic achievement. . Hence the importance of starting emotional education early in life.
Emotional literacy is the ability to identify, understand, and respond to emotions in oneself and others in a healthy manner.
Children who can label their emotions are on their way to becoming emotionally competent.
How can an adult help the child?
By Expressing our Feelings. One way to help children learn to label their emotions is to have healthy emotional expressions modelled for them by the adults in their lives. For example, “Oh boy, that is frustrating” I better take a deep breath. Healthily showing our emotions is the best way to teach children how to express feelings.
Label Children’s Feelings. When we provide feeling names for children’s emotional expressions, we make a child’s feeling vocabulary grow. For example, you look happy, or I can see that …make you feel sad. As children’s feeling vocabulary develops, their ability to correctly identify feelings in themselves and others also progresses.
Play Games, Sing Songs, and Read Stories with New Feeling Words. Adults can enhance children’s feeling vocabularies by introducing games, songs, and storybooks featuring new feeling words. Parents, Teachers and other caregivers can adapt songs such as “If you’re happy and you know it” with different feelings or Hello, how are you today? And ask Are you feeling happy? Are you feeling sad? And so on.
The adult can show pictures with different expressions and then give them a mirror to copy the expression.
Can put in a container some expression pictures and pass around when the music stops a child take one picture and try to copy it, ask what makes him feel that way.
You can also play to guess the emotion. One child makes the expression, and the other guess.
Read books and ask about the emotions.