How to communicate how you are feeling
Overview
This lesson aims to support expression of emotions in appropriate ways, when and where to express different emotions, and to develop awareness of emotion regulation strategies.
Foundation Knowledge for this lesson includes identification of at least one emotion in themselves or others, ability to differentiate between self and others, and awareness of body parts used in expressing emotions.
Generalisation ideas
- Sorting: Sort feelings that are familiar and unfamiliar/expected vs unexpected in particular situations/about particular events, situations, scenarios/etc.
- Matching: match physical expressions of feelings with pictures e.g. crying and sad, happy and laugh, angry and yelling
- Stem phrases: Rather than ‘I feel…’ use a different language e.g. ‘Today I’m …’, ‘My body is telling me I am …’
- Communication systems: ensure that your student is able to do this lesson with whatever modes of communication they are familiar with e.g. signing, picture exchange, verbally
- Extending to understanding common situations that feeling occurs in e.g. ‘I feel happy when I hear music.
- Extend to include ‘I need…’ to support management of difficult feelings e.g. ‘I feel scared, I need to talk to an adult’
- Customise the lesson to include photos of your students expressions of emotions
- Teachable moments: looking out for opportunities to ask ‘how are you feeling?’, ‘how did you feel when?’
- Social stories: Write stories using images about scenarios or things that have happened or may happen.
- Picture sentences: you could use these to develop social understanding appropriate ways to react to specific emotions e.g. ‘I feel angry = I need talk to + adult