Where I Feel: Emotion Identification Tool For Kids
Therapist Aid has a great online tool that I often recommend to parents. The Where I Feel Interactive Tool can be used by parents at home to help kids identify the emotions they experience.
Before a person can learn to manage their emotions, they must learn to identify them. Like most skills, identifying emotions can be learned, practiced, and improved. For children, identifying emotions as they're occurring is an especially tall challenge. Even adults, with a lifetime of experience, are often caught off-guard by their feelings. One technique that anyone can use to better spot emotions is to learn about the clues their body gives.
Mindfulness teaches us that many emotion clues come in the form of physical sensations. For example, a person who is angry might turn red and feel hot in the face. As their anger progresses, they may clench their fists and begin to tremble.
Intended for kids 5+, Therapist Aid’s “Where I Feel Interactive Activity” can be used on a tablet or desktop. Children can draw where they feel various emotions throughout their body. This creates a great opportunity to help your child explore and identify their personal emotion clues.
When done, the drawing can be printed or saved as a graphic.
Suggested Uses
Teach Emotion Words & Symptoms: Help children name and identify basic emotions, and where they exist within their bodies. What does it feel like to be happy? Sad? Worried? Try discussing specific examples your child has experienced.
Check-In: When used as a check-in, ask your child to draw where they have felt emotions during the past week, or at that very moment.
Exploration: After a sharing a story, this activity may be used to look for emotional clues. What sensations might your child notice next time they're in a similar situation, and what might these clues tell them about their emotional state?
