Around our house, between having a child on the autism spectrum and having kids with trauma backgrounds who have gone to and some who continue to go to therapy to help them deal with and express their feelings, we have a lot of books about feelings around the house. One of those books is Today I Feel Silly: and Other Moods That Make My Day by Jamie Lee Curtis.
One of the things I like best about this book is how it talks about in a given day, we may feel a whole bunch of different moods, sometimes at different times and sometimes even at the same time. I think that’s a really good thing for kids to be able to understand and identify in themselves.
Last week, we read the book again and I made some super simple activities to reinforce the concepts.
I set out different things on the table like string, yarn, paper shreds in purple, and ribbon and had the kids draw a face on a piece of paper and use what was on the table to make silly hair. I was surprised that the results were not very silly or wild! It did get them talking about the feeling they were trying to express on the face they made and several of them wrote the feeling word onto their craft.
I made emotion sticks using emotion cards that I printed from here  (note that the way they are set up, you need to copy and paste them into a word document before printing). I then got the kids to help cut out the different emotions and glue them onto coloured cardstock. Once that was dry, we glued them onto popsicle sticks.
I used these emotion card sticks in two ways. The first was to line them up on the counter and have the kids come in one at a time and go through what each emotion was and then have them pick two that they were feeling at that time. The point of this exercise was to show that it is normal and okay to be feeling more than one thing at once.
The next activity we did was to all sit at the kitchen table with the sticks and for me to describe a scenario and for them to hold up the emotion that they think that scenario would make them feel. I think this helped with some of the more obscure ones on the cards such as confused, excited or anxious.