Emotional Literacy : A Guide to Help Children Express their FeelingsEmotional Literacy EducationChildren go through a lot of emotional ups and downs. Developing their emotional literacy is a key skill to help them feel confident when expressing their feelings. For some children their emotional life can become unstable or they might start to feel insecure. This can lead to a serious negative impact not only upon the
learning process
but also upon their life in general. Children can improve their emotional intelligence in many ways. The starting point is developing the
language of emotions.
Children develop their literacy in this area in accordance with their
emotional development. 
Emotions are very powerful and should not be ignored. Moods are part of life and we should embrace them and manage them to our advantage. Since emotions are known to have such a powerful effect upon children’s learning and general wellbeing, then children should be taught how to develop their emotional intelligence. Developing a bank of words to express emotions or moods is key to developing self awareness. Research shows that just being able to verbalise an emotion helps children to relieve some of the stress associated with it. Recognizing the mood of others by their faces will help kids to manage their relationships with peers. Check out this great video on the science of emotional literacy from Half Full: Social Science for Raising Happy Kids
How to Improve Emotional Intelligence through EQ ActivitiesActivities to develop emotional literacy education includeName that Emotion For this game prepare
a list of emotion words
that can be cut in pieces. Each person draws one word. The person who can write down the most synonyms is the winner! Or use a mood faces like the one above to name the facial expressions or emotional expressions shown. The game below is also an excellent way to develop emotional literacy. Click on the EQ chart for more information.
Look at various pictures of photos, famous art works or even advertising. Discuss what types of feeling and emotions you sense from the picture. What are the mood words that come up? Children love this activity. How are you feeling today? In this activity each person in the family expresses how they are feeling about a family decision. The key idea is to use as many descriptive words to explain precisely what it is that you are feeling. Modeling this activity first for kids is a great way to start off. For example, "When you help me to take care of the garden I am in a good mood and feel proud and happy." Emotion Cards Use emotion cards, that is cards with pictures of emotions or mood faces on them to play various games. For example, ask your child to choose three emotion faces that show how they, themselves are feeling today and share this with the family. Or you could look through the mood face cards together and decide what emotion the faces are showing. You can also play games like snap with pairs of the emotion cards matching the same facial expressions. The important idea in all these games is you are expanding and increasing your child's emotional vocabulary about their feelings and emotions, moods and more.
Children in today's world can be exposed to so many things: and much more. Developing a way to talk about feelings and emotions is one of the first steps to dealing with such issues. Like this page? Here's some more pages you might enjoy reading:
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Emotional Intelligence Resources |