E-MOTIONS

How I deal with emotions in the year 1 classroom

Feelings and emotions are essential in our lives and therefore it is important that children learn the vocabulary related to feelings in order to express themselves clearly and to  understand that feelings change and that it is okay to feel different ways.

The first step in the year 1 classroom is to identify and name emotions and to recognize how these feelings are expressed.

In Preschool, children had already worked on the basic emotions through a well-known story book "The Colour Monster". I retold the story and seated my class in groups of colored monsters.

At the beginning of the school year, I introduced some of the basic feelings through stories in Spanish and in collaboration with the Spanish teacher. These books are:

These books were left in the reading corner and children love to refer back to them in their free time.

Each week we worked on an emotion and we gradually built a display with the different emotions we had learned about and added more. During the whole year, we are constantly referring back to these emotions every time they appear in any situation on a daily basis.