There are loads of fun activities for identifying emotions that help children of all ages develop emotional awareness. It is crucial for our social and emotional well-being: it develops our emotional intelligence, helping us build relationships and control our emotional responses.
People learn and develop this skill throughout their lives, but some find it harder than others. For instance, people with autism often struggle because of their difficulty with empathy, reading facial expressions, and understanding social cues.
Let’s have a look at some activities to help identify emotions.
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Emotions charts
Before children can identify emotions in other people, they must be able to identify and understand their own emotions.
Visual emotion charts are great for helping elementary and middle school students identify and communicate how they’re feeling.
These can be bought or made in many formats, e.g., using cartoons/photos, colors, and words/phrases. They can be ticked on the chart or moved around daily so autistic children can identify and share their feelings.
Alongside this, younger/less emotionally aware children will also need help recognizing signals from their bodies. For example:
- “I think you’re worried because you’re frowning and said that your tummy feels funny.”
You can also model this by talking about how you feel when you experience certain emotions. For example:
- “I must be tired because I keep yawning,< and I feel really grumpy – I should go to bed early!”
To reinforce this, you could include different body signals on their emotions chart so they can make these links independently.
As they advance in their emotional understanding, you could add some synonyms for different emotions to build a broad emotional vocabulary, e.g., angry: furious, cross, and livid.
For children with more advanced language skills, you could also include common figurative expressions for emotions, such as ‘over the moon’ or ‘on top of the world’ to express happiness.
Drama activities
Drama activities offer an engaging and dynamic way to help individuals identify and express emotions. They encourage creativity and self-expression while promoting empathy and understanding of different perspectives.
Through the lens of drama, individuals can practice recognizing their own feelings and those of others, making it an effective tool for emotional literacy. Here are some drama activities that can aid in identifying emotions.
Emotions charades
This is a great emotion identification game in which children take turns acting out a given emotion for someone to guess—no resources, prep, or expenditure are required!
You could make or buy a deck of visual emotion cards, but you can also use virtual ones or simply draw/write the emotions as you go.
You could start with simple emotions like happiness and sadness. As your child gets better at identifying them, you may move on to more complex emotions, such as jealousy and anxiety.
If they’re still struggling to match body signals to emotions, it would be helpful to include pictures of people showing emotions rather than simple emojis on the cards.
Paired role play
Paired role plays based on emotions and social interactions are great drama-based emotion identification activities for high school children.
Each pair will be given an emotion to act out: one character will act out the emotion, and the other will respond. They may demonstrate empathy by offering help and suggesting a coping strategy.
The pair could decide on the stimulus for the emotion, or this can also be given. For example:
Scenario: Revising for a test in the library
Emotion: Stress
Sorting and matching activities
Any activity allowing younger children to sort and match emotions is helpful.
For elementary or middle school children, you could use worksheets or flashcards to match emotional vocabulary to pictures. You could also provide emotion sheets, such as one focusing on happiness.
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The child could then sort and match pictures, body signals, and synonyms to the given emotion, sticking them on the sheet.
For high school children, you could raise the challenge by bringing in a pile of magazines and newspapers so they can find their own pictures to represent a given emotion. These emotion collages also make great classroom displays!
You could use sorting and matching for middle or high school children by providing age-relevant scenarios. Get the kids to match images, words, body signals, and appropriate coping strategies to these scenarios.
For example:
Scenario: You didn’t get the grade you wanted on a test
Emotion words/images: Angry
Body signals: Clenched teeth/shouting/frowning
Coping strategy: Quiet time/deep breaths
Here are some other simple matching games that you could make yourself or play using pre-bought flashcards:
- Emotions bingo
- Emotions snap
- Emotions pairs
There are loads of game ideas available online. Look around and see what’s available, or find inspiration for making your own games!
Discussion prompts
These can take many different forms and can be tailored to various ages. Situation cards, videos, stories, and pictures are particularly effective prompts.
A good identifying emotions activity for high school kids is to watch a short, age-appropriate video, like one showing exam stress.
As they watch the clip, they should write words to describe the emotions being experienced, the causes, and the body signals the characters are likely to be experiencing.
This can then be used as the basis for a discussion about what’s been observed and some effective self-help strategies to keep emotions under control.
Stories (narrative and social) are also great discussion prompts for any age and can be taught alongside writing skills.
For example, you could focus on a character description that conveys a strong emotion, looking for clues that show the reader how the character feels.
More able students could even plan/write their own ‘show, don’t tell’ description of how a person in a story or picture feels. This activity emphasizes the ‘clues’ to other people’s emotions, which is great for helping them recognize emotional and social cues in others.
Here’s an example of an annotated picture prompt for a ‘show, don’t tell’ activity:
Emotions journal
Encouraging autistic children to keep an emotions journal is a great way to help them develop the habit of thinking about how they feel. This may also help them develop their emotional vocabulary.
Elementary or middle school children may need you to provide more structure and guidance on organizing and recording their emotions.
If they’re less verbal and less confident with writing, they could fill out a structured journal sheet or select pictures and words to express how they feel.
Encourage high school children to use words and images to express themselves more creatively and independently.
For example, they could express themselves verbally in their journal using poems, free prose, or song lyrics, or just use images if they prefer.
Some children may also prefer to use IT rather than handwriting a journal, e.g., using a digital journal, an emotion tracker, or simply typing their entries.
Digital apps and games
In addition to physical games, you could also try searching for emotional apps and games you can download on your devices.
If you’re unsure about picking a game, talk to your child’s teachers about the best ones to download.
The school may also have some great IT-based games and activities that they use in class. If the software allows, they may even be able to give you a login to access these at home.
Improve emotional awareness with fun identifying emotions activities
Helping children enhance their emotional awareness and expression from a young age will help them achieve social, academic, and professional success.
Although this may seem daunting, these skills can be learned using feelings identification activities like the ones explored here. Hopefully, these have given you a good starting point, but there are many other fantastic activities out there.
Look around and talk to professionals about the best activities for you. Be patient, stick with it, and watch your child’s emotional growth!
FAQs
Q: How do you learn to identify emotions?
A: There are many strategies you can use to teach children how to identify emotions, like the following:
- Telling stories
- Playing emotions games
- Sorting, matching, and labeling emotions
- Playing with their peers
- Responding to emotion-based discussion prompts
- Observing and recording emotions in themselves and others
- Role-playing/acting out emotions
Q: What is a good emotions identification game?
A: Emotions charades (sometimes called Emotion ID) is a great game to use in a classroom or at home. The children can work in small groups or individually to act out a given emotion for their team/class to guess.
Q: What is a good identifying emotions activity for high school students?
A: Prompts like situation cards, videos, pictures, and short stories can be used as the basis for role plays and discussions that explore emotions. The situations should be relevant to them, e.g., exam pressure or group interactions.
Q: What are some efficient activities for identifying emotions for middle school?
A: Here are some identifying emotions activities that are great for middle school children:
- Emotion sorting games: sorting visual cue cards into emotion categories
- Regular visual mood check-ins using an emotions chart
- Emotions journals
References
Garcia-Garcia, J. M., Penichet, V. M., Lozano, M. D., & Fernando, A. (2022). Using emotion recognition technologies to teach children with autism spectrum disorder how to identify and express emotions. Universal Access in the Information Society, 21(4), 809-825. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10209-021-00818-y
Adilmar Coelho Dantas, Marcelo Zanchetta do Nascimento, ‘Recognition of Emotions for People with Autism: An Approach to Improve Skills,’ International Journal of Computer Games Technology, Research Article.15 January 2022, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/2952
