Emotional Animals Kids Game. Tricia our guest blogger shows us about a very simple activity to teach our kids about different emotions and feelings.

Emotional animals is a kids game you can make at home with any form of cubes. Here’s how tricia made it:

 

 

Hi, I’m Tricia from SweeterThanSweets! 

I’m excited to be guest posting here at Craftionary today. I’m sharing with you a tutorial and game that you can play with kids ages 2 through 6. (Older kids would probably enjoy it, too, especially helping teach the younger ones.) Young children tend to relate well to animals. So why not use animals to help teach kids about emotions in a charades-style game?

 

I graduated with my Master’s degree in School Psychology 2 weeks before our daughter (“Little Sweets”) was born and I became a stay-at-home-mom. She’s now 2 years old, and I’ve been enjoying finding ways to help her learn to recognize and deal with her emotions. The Emotional Animals Game is played by rolling the “dice” and acting out whatever you roll. Let’s let Little Sweets show you how it’s done:

I painted two of Little Sweets’ unfinished wood square blocks with some craft store paint, but that is totally optional. Now you’re going to want to pick out some emotions to write on one of your dice. There are four basic emotions, from which most other emotions come: mad, sad, happy and scared. Then there are plenty of other options for you to pick from. Just think about which feelings or states you’d want to teach your child(ren) about.

Emotional Animals Game

Next, pick six animals that are relatively easy to mimic. We chose: cat, dog, monkey, cow, mouse and elephant. (Elephant is a little harder than the others…maybe a bird would’ve been easier?) Now let’s see your best “silly dog”!

Hmmm, what would a scared elephant look like?

This game can also be taken a step further, depending on your child’s readiness to explore emotions deeper. For instance, when Little Sweets acts out a mad animal, we can talk about the best ways to handle anger. Put it in terms of how an animal might react because, again, young children tend to relate well to animals.

 

Teaching kids about emotions

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