ACTIVITY QUICKJUMP LINKS:
KIMOCHIS® FEELINGS FACT:
There’s more to feelings than being just mad, sad, or glad.
Kids (and adults, too) are often quite minimalist when it comes to identifying and relating to their feelings. “Mad,” “sad,” “glad,” “okay,” and “fine” are the most commonly expressed feeling words, but we of course know that there are hundreds of other more nuanced feelings, like “annoyed,” “upset,” “joyful,” “irritated,” “so-so,” and “confused.” There is a wide range of feelings to describe reactions we have to the experiences that make up our lives, and our goal in this section of the activity guide is to help kids access and express those feelings. This group of activities therefore focuses on building a feelings vocabulary, which will enhance a child’s emotional understanding and self-awareness.
Therapeutic Objective:
Increase feelings vocabulary, along with the ability to talk more comfortably about feelings.
The Activities
Before engaging in any of the activities below, begin by explaining to the child that pretty much everything people do and think involves a feeling. We may or may not know what the feeling is or be aware of it at the time, but we are virtually ALWAYS feeling something. Talk with the child about different situations in which feelings exist but they may not be aware of them, like when lying in bed, sitting on the toilet, playing a computer game. Knowing what we feel is not always fun, but it’s fundamental to helping us be in charge of what we think and how we behave.
We suggest keeping your Kimochis® feeling pillows in a bowl or basket in your therapy room.
Interestingly, we have observed that changing the shape, size, and feel of the container often changes how people interact with the pillows. Some container options are: a wide basket (so people can see all the words on the pillows at a glance), a bucket (for digging), a backpack (for unpacking), or a tall glass vase (to point to feelings).
WHAT FEELINGS DO YOU KNOW?
Gather together a sheet of paper and coloring/writing tools. Begin by writing the title My Feelings Poster at the top of the page. Have the child choose something to write with and ask them to write down as many feeling words as they know. For children who do not write yet or don’t want to, you can do the writing for them. (Of note is that some people see words in color, so you might ask the child if they see their feelings as being a particular color.)
Next, have the child empty the bowl of Kimochis® feeling pillows onto a table or the floor. Then have them match the words they wrote with the corresponding feeling pillows. Put those feeling pillows in a pile. Next, look at the words on the remaining pillows—the feelings they did not write down. Talk about any they may not understand. Once you’ve explained those feelings to them, add those words to their poster as well. (If there are feelings they listed that don’t have a pillow to match, we have an activity for that too—we’ll get to it soon!)
Ask the child to become a “feelings detective” in between your meetings with them, telling them to listen for new, interesting feeling words and then bring them to your next session. You’ll also want to bring some fun new feeling words to your sessions, like “perplexed,” “elated,” “gob-smacked.” Add all the new words to the poster as the child learns and collects more feeling words.
HOW FEELINGS WORK.
Acknowledge from the previous activity how many feeling words the child already knows. Explain that feelings, at their simplest, can be put into one of two categories:
(1) feelings our body enjoys having and (2) feelings our body does not enjoy having. Share that we call this second group of feelings “hard-to-have feelings” as they don’t feel good inside us. Explain that all feelings are important, even the difficult ones, because they help us learn and grow.
Get two paper plates. Have the child draw a happy face on one and a sad face on the other. (Or you can create these plates yourself ahead of time.) Ask the child to sort the feeling pillows onto the two plates to show which feelings they enjoy having and which they find hard to have. Help the child as needed. The child may find that some feelings are hard to sort because the way that feeling impacts them depends on the situation that triggers that feeling. For example, you can have a happy surprise or an upsetting surprise. Talk about this. Some children may opt to put some of the pillows between the two plates, which itself can lead to an interesting discussion and important insights.
Let the child know that you will be teaching them communication tools to help them handle hard-to-have feelings so that they can help make things better for themselves and others when faced with challenges. Additionally, let the child know that you will be coaching them to learn ways to create more nice-to-have feelings!
CHARADES. This is an old-fashioned game that is always a big hit. To play, take turns with the child pulling feeling pillows one at a time and acting it out for the other to guess. You can keep score if you want, but this activity is really more about having fun with feelings while simultaneously giving children an opportunity to practice showing how feelings “look” on people and what actions they prompt. Kids like repetition, so you can play this game somewhat regularly—to act out feelings experienced in the past week, for example, or feelings you’d like to have more of. You can also make the activity more verbal by lining up the feeling pillows on the floor word-side-up. Then take turns describing a situation in which someone might have this feeling. For example, for sorry, you could say, “A person might have this feeling if they accidentally broke their sister’s toy.”
FEELINGS MAKER. There are many, many feelings out there in the world. Your “feelings detective” kids will bring in feelings, and they may also be great at creating them. For example, did you know that “constipated” can be an emotion? Or “hexxy”—the feeling of being happy and excited at the same time? For those feelings that children identify themselves or for which there is currently no corresponding Kimochis® feeling pillow, we’ve created a Make Your Own Kimochis® Feelings template. Print out multiple copies of the pillow shape, cut them out, and then let children write their own feeling words and draw their own facial expressions on them. When you have several, laminate them, trim them as needed, and then add them to your bowl of feelings! This helps kids realize that there are lots of feelings out there and that other kids are working on building their feelings vocabulary too.
Note: Each pack of Kimochis® feeling pillows comes with three blank pillows, because, as we all know, there are way more feelings than there are pillows! Allow the child to discover a blank pillow and express curiosity about it. Explain that there’s not always a word for how we are feeling, or we may not feel ready yet to talk about our feelings. You can write a significant new feeling that comes up during one of your sessions on one of the blank pillows, you can let the child do so, or the child can make a cutout of the new feeling instead (see above). Either way, add the new pillow to your feelings bowl as the child’s vocabulary grows. And always keep at least one blank pillow for those times when children just don’t know what they’re feeling or don’t have a word(s) to describe it.
FEELING FAMILIAR. Sit with the bowl of feeling pillows in between you and the child. Take turns picking a pillow from the bowl and sharing a time you each felt that feeling. Feelings can be specifically chosen or picked randomly. Practice talking about feelings, and in subsequent sessions, you can each talk about a time you felt that feeling since you last met.
Note: Encourage the child to consider a wide variety of life experiences. If the child uses a feeling word incorrectly or can’t identify a feeling, provide an explanation of the appropriate word, along with a situation in which that feeling might be felt. For insecure, for example: “This is a feeling you might have if you are not yet sure about what you are doing or saying. You might feel insecure, or not confident, in a new situation because you are uncertain about how to act. Starting at a new school could make you feel insecure.”
Kids may use the same example to explain two different feelings. Acknowledge that they could feel both feelings in the one situation, but ask them to give an additional example of a time they had or could have the second feeling. If, for instance, the child says they felt sad when their friend didn’t include them in a game and then repeats that same situation for the feeling left out, acknowledge that you would feel both sad and left out in that situation too, but then ask for a different time they felt sad (like when they got sick and couldn’t go to a friend’s party). This encourages children to really think about their life experiences and their reactions to them.
WEEKLY HIGHLIGHTS. Invite the child to choose one or more feelings they especially enjoyed having during the week. You can choose one or two feelings as well. Tell each other about the situations that evoked these enjoyable feelings. You can build on this by pulling another feeling from the bowl that is being experienced in the retelling and/or by pulling another feeling the listener is experiencing as the speaker is remembering the feeling. For example, the child may talk about feeling excited because school was unexpectedly cancelled one day. Then they might pull disappointed because they had to return to school the next day. You, however, could explain that you felt happy while listening to the child’s excitement and then share a time when you yourself felt excited. This helps children begin to make connections between varied feelings while expanding their capacity for communication about emotions.
QUIET PLEASE. You can make any of the above activities nonverbal for children who find it really hard to talk about their feelings. These children can be encouraged to show rather than tell. Ask these children to show you all the feelings they felt this week. You can add prompts, such as, “Show me all the feelings you felt this week about [school, your vacation, your mom being away, your brother, etc.].”
FEELINGS HIDE-AND-SEEK. Have the child pick three or four feeling pillows and hide them in your office while your eyes are closed. Then hunt for the pillows with the child giving you cues as you move closer (“warm,” “warmer,” “boiling”) or farther away (“cold,” “colder,” “freezing”) from each one. Once a feeling pillow is found, both child and therapist talk about a time they felt that feeling. You can take a turn hiding the pillows too. Again, encourage the child to come up with different situations in which they have felt the feeling rather than letting them repeat the same situations, providing prompts, if necessary. Build on this by having the child talk about a time that someone else they know had that feeling (their dad, siblings, a friend) or by creating a story that incorporates all of the found feelings.
FEELINGS TOSS. Pick multiple feelings from the bowl and create a story using all of them. When each feeling is mentioned in the story, toss that feeling pillow into a chosen target (like a separate basket or empty trash can). Keep score or increase distance from the target to keep the game challenging. The important part of this activity is creating a story together that incorporates the various feelings chosen.
FEELINGS TARGET PRACTICE. Make or purchase a target poster with a bull’s-eye in the middle that can be attached to a wall or door. Take turns tossing feeling pillows at the target and talking about each feeling or creating a story about it as it is tossed. You could say, for example, “You look like you are feeling frustrated because you keep missing the bull’s-eye” or “I can tell you are feeling something; can you tell me what it is?” To which the child might respond, “I’m feeling sad that I am losing.” Keep score or increase distance from the target to keep the game challenging. The more you practice talking about feelings with the child, the more comfortable the child will become expressing feelings.
Note: When you are winning in any of these activities, it can lead to interesting conversations. Children may feel upset and compare themselves negatively to your ability. This opens the door to addressing the value of practice and highlighting how much longer and more often you’ve had the chance to engage in this activity compared to the child. This will help children recognize how and why adults and people older than them have had more experience doing things and therefore have gained more knowledge about those things than the child could possibly have. This recognition will be helpful when kids are teased by older siblings or older kids about something they don’t know. Help them develop applicable responses such as, “I’m not as old as you, so I haven’t learned that yet” and “You keep winning because you’ve had more years to practice.”
WALK TO THE FEELING. Invite the child to place the following Kimochis® feeling pillows in different locations in the room: happy, sad, mad, left out, silly, frustrated, loved, scared, disappointed, and grateful. Tell the child this is a no-talking game and a way to start becoming more aware of feelings and the ways feelings can help us in life.
Instruct the child to walk to feeling(s) they:
- Enjoyed having this week
- Did not enjoy having this week
- Have a lot of
- Don’t have much of
- Want more of
- Want less of
- Want to have every day
- Don’t enjoy having but know they have tools for
- Don’t enjoy having and want to learn more tools for
- Wish their parents had more of
- Wish their parents had less of
- Know are hard to have (both for themselves and for their friends)
- Think most people want to have more of
Note: These are just suggestions for prompts. You can certainly change them or create your own!
This activity can be expanded by giving the child a choice between two feelings and then giving such prompts as, “If you had to feel sad or mad, walk to the feeling you would rather have” and “When you lose when playing a game, do you feel more frustrated or sad?” This builds awareness of having more than one feeling at a time and helps kids evaluate how they feel about their emotions. The child can also come up with questions and feeling choices for you to answer, which helps them learn that all people experience lots of different feelings. It also allows the child to have some control over session activities and to build trust between the two of you as they see you acknowledging some hard-to-have feelings as well.
WHAT’S ON YOUR PLATE? Here’s another great nonverbal activity for times when talking isn’t necessary or desirable. Hand the child a paper plate. Toss the Kimochis® feeling pillows on the floor or on a table and have the child turn the feeling pillows word-side-up. Give the child prompts from the list below or of your own making, inviting them to pick up feeling pillows that respond to the prompts and put them on the plate. Alternatively, children can write or draw their feeling word responses on the plate. Sample prompts include:
- “What feelings do you have at recess?”
- “What feelings do you have before going to school?”
- “What feelings do you have before bedtime?”
- “What feelings do you have when you have to stop doing something you’re enjoying?”
- “What feelings do you have when someone is unkind to you?”
- “What feelings do you have when you see a spider?”
- “What feelings do you want to have more of? Less of?”
For another version of this activity, have the child decorate a plate that stays in your office to be repeatedly used as a check-in. As the child enters each session, prompt them to put the feelings they experienced that week on the plate. You can choose to talk about the pillows they picked or to not talk about them, as it’s helpful for children just to to acknowledge their feelings and have them known to others. Or you can extend this activity by providing additional prompts, such as:
- “Pick up your favorite feeling from this week.”
- “Add two feelings to your plate that you wish you had experienced this week.”
- “Take off the feeling that was the hardest to have.”
- “Show me the feeling you felt you had tools for to make things better for yourself.”
Again, the child can guide you in doing this activity as well, as a way of enhancing their awareness that adults also have a wide range of feelings.
FEELINGS STORIES. Ask the child to pick three or four objects in your office. Then have them randomly select three or four feeling pillows from the basket. Have the child create a story using the objects and the feelings. If they need some help or encouragement, you can join in creating the story and adding your own objects and feeling pillows. This activity gives children an opportunity to talk about feelings that aren’t specifically about themselves.
Another variation on this activity is to read a story aloud together and have the child pull out the corresponding pillows as they recognize the feelings that different characters in the story are having. If needed, help the child consider what is being felt and pull feelings with them as you read. Or you can even gather the feeling pillows you know will be encountered in the story and instruct the child to pick up each one when they hear it occurring in the story. Wrap up by sharing how you both admired or did not admire how feelings were handled. For example, what did you both think was helpful and what might you do differently if you found yourself in a similar situation?
STORY OF MY DAY. Take turns with the child talking about your day or week as you incorporate the Kimochis® feeling pillows into your discussion. For example, “When I got up, I felt sleepy and cranky. Then my dog came in and licked me, so I felt a little happy.” Pull the feelings or point to them as they’re mentioned.
Note: You can help children along with their stories to lengthen and deepen them with such prompts as: “At breakfast today, I had _______, and that made me feel ________. Then at school, the teacher told us to ________, and I felt ____________.”