It’s super important to spend time explicitly teaching kids what the different feelings are, how to identify them, and then strategies they can try when they’re feeling that way, and then giving them time to practice those strategies.
~ Zeba from Episode 108 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast
Episode Summary
One of the most important things we can teach in kindergarten isn’t academic…it’s emotional. In this episode, I’m walking you through how to teach emotional intelligence to young learners so they can better understand, express, and regulate their feelings.
In this episode I share:
- Why identifying emotions is a foundational step in social-emotional learning
- How to teach emotions through pictures, songs, discussions, and real-life examples
- The difference between easy feelings and hard feelings (and how I explain it to students)
- My favorite classroom strategies for helping students self-regulate like breathing techniques, calm corners, and role-play
- How my children’s book Felipe the Feeling Frog supports this work in a meaningful, kid-friendly way
- Why practice and consistency are key when it comes to helping kids manage big feelings
Join the FREE 5-Day SEO Challenge:
Get the Bundle:
Learn More:
Resources:
Social Emotional Learning BUNDLE
Play Curriculum – Social Emotional Learning
Related Episodes:
- Setting Up A Calm Down Corner For Your Classroom ~ Ep. 100
- Teaching Self-Regulation Skills Through Everyday Routines ~ Ep. 80
- Strategies for Teaching Emotional Regulation and Handling Extreme Outbursts ~ Ep. 55
Connect with Zeba:
- Instagram – @kindergartencafe
- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
Read the Transcript
[0:00] Hey, teacher friends, it’s Zeba from Kindergarten Cafe, and today I want to talk about how to teach emotional intelligence in kindergarten. One of the most important things that we can do for our kindergartners is help them understand how to identify and regulate their emotions. So let’s dive in.
[0:17] Music. You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs, and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started.
[1:12] We want our students to be able to identify emotions because one, it starts the building blocks of being able to empathize with others if they can identify how others are feeling. It helps them to also manage their own emotions and self-regulate when they are upset. They’re able to identify how they are feeling and make a plan to help them feel better. And that is key during school. If they get upset during a learning activity, you want them to be able to self-regulate, emotionally regulate, and go back to the learning. Because that’s why they’re at school. They’re at school to learn, and they can’t do that if they are feeling upset and dysregulated. So how do we do that? The first is teaching kids to recognize and identify emotions. That means explicitly teaching them what the different emotions are, what they look like, showing pictures of kids’ faces.
[2:06] Or having them make the face themselves and look around the room. Definitely talking a lot about what our faces look like when we are feeling this way. Right? Being very explicit about it. Let’s talk about being sad. Why might we feel sad? What is a time we felt sad? What does it feel like when we are sad? Maybe we want to cry. Maybe we don’t want to play a game. Right? We don’t feel like laughing or having fun. What does our face look like? well, maybe we’re crying or maybe we have a frown. Maybe we look like we’re about to cry, so our eyes get really, you know, they filled up with tears. Singing songs like, if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands. And then going to other verses like, if you’re sad and you know it, say boo-hoo. If you’re mad and you know it, say I’m mad or take a deep breath.
[2:55] Things like that. But I also like when I’m introducing how to identify emotions, talking about emotions in terms of easy feelings and hard feelings and I do this in my children’s book Felipe the Feeling Frog Felipe goes around and sees how different people are feeling and talks about if they’re easy feelings or hard feelings and they talk about what strategies kids can do or the characters in the book can do if they’re having a hard feeling to make it go from a hard feeling to an easy feeling so an easy feeling is one that you don’t need a strategy for One like it’s happy, excited, proud. A hard feeling is one that you might need a strategy for. Tired, sad, bored, frustrated, angry. And Felipe learns that there’s no such thing as a bad feeling. Felipe learns that everyone gets mad and everyone gets frustrated. It’s how we handle that that matters.
[3:48] And so I use that book to introduce feelings and to talk about them as easy feelings and hard feelings. And then we’ll do different sorting activities where they’re sorting activities by easy feelings or hard feelings. We’ll talk about some of the strategies they talk about in the book. And if you want to learn more about like how I wrote the book, I have a whole episode on behind the scenes. You can order the books anywhere you get books, but most easily probably is Amazon. But your bookstores can order them and everything. You can get them off my website. I’ll put all those links in the show notes, but I like to use Felipe the Feeling Frog to introduce emotions. That’s why I wrote it. I didn’t think there was anything else like it out there in terms of easy feelings or hard feelings and what can we do about those hard feelings, right? So then we start going into teaching kids how to regulate their emotions when they are upset. So we go over strategies they can try, most importantly being different types of deep breathing exercises.
[4:42] Breathing like a snake. Breathing like a lion, right? Breathing like a flower and trying to get the flower petals off. Like, you just spend time teaching them different ways to do deep breathing. You do them, As you’re transitioning to the rug, you practice them. My favorite, I’ve talked about many times, is five finger breathing, where they trace their finger up and breathe in, and then they trace their finger down and breathe out. And they go up and down all five fingers until they’ve had five deep breaths. You introduce the calm corner, which we talked about in a previous episode, and how they can use it when they’re feeling upset. But it’s important that we are explicitly teaching these self-regulation strategies, strategies and we are giving time for students to practice using them when they are not upset so that the next time they are upset they are able to use those strategies. Maybe they need a reminder or a prompt but when they are upset and I’ve said this before that is not the time to teach them a new strategy.
[5:43] So we want to teach it to them when they are calm when they’re ready to learn so that way they can use it when they actually need it. The other thing you can do when teaching emotional intelligence and teaching social emotional skills is the use of role play or different like social stories. So I love giving kids puppets or having them act out with partners, different scenarios. I have a whole role play pack that you can get for any social emotional skill that I’m doing. I let them do some role play for it and act it out, you know, like, okay, so I’ll give a scenario. What happens if a friend took the toy you were using? What would you do? Or what happens if you saw someone feeling left out at recess? What would you do? And have them act it out with their partner or, like I said, with a puppet. We can also do this when we’re reading stories. Anytime we’re reading stories, we can talk about how the characters are feeling, what strategy could they use, what would you do if that happened to you, starting to build the building blocks of empathy, perspective taking.
[6:45] Things like that, as well as continuing to practice identifying emotions. So I do think it’s super important to spend time explicitly teaching kids what the different feelings are, how to identify them, and then strategies they can try when they’re feeling that way. And then giving them time to practice those strategies. It’s also why, as I talked about in that calm corner episode, all classrooms need a calm corner, A place where kids can go when they are feeling upset and dysregulated.
[7:16] And you want to give kids a chance to practice being in that space and using the strategies there. But I also in that area have a little like emotions chart so that if they’re not able to say because they’re too upset how they’re feeling, they can point to it.
[7:33] They can point to one of the emotions to tell me how they’re feeling. And being able to identify how they’re feeling is a foundational primary step before they’re able to use a strategy to regulate their emotion. Because they can’t identify what strategy they should be doing or trying out different strategies if they don’t know how they’re feeling. Because it’s different strategies. Which is, again, why I like introducing this with my children’s book, Felipe the feeling frog because he meets many characters feeling many different things and they all have different strategies. It’s also important to try different strategies because it’s not just that different feelings need different strategies, but different kids prefer different strategies. I mean, think about when you’re upset, what do you do versus maybe someone else in your life, how they might handle it differently, right? So everyone prefers different things when they are upset. It’s about finding the strategy that works for you. After you’ve done this explicit teaching and giving them time to practice, you can continue this work through role play scenarios with the kids. It’s a great little brain break activity, morning meeting activity. You can do the self-regulation strategies as transitions as they’re coming to the rug to calm them down. And you can continue to talk about feelings and emotions and empathy and perspective taking whenever you’re reading any story.
[8:54] Anytime you’re talking about how a character is feeling, you’re building off of this work and checking off some literacy standards as well. I have a ton of resources for you if you are wondering how best to support kids with learning about their emotions. One being, I have a challenge you can start at any time. It will start the Monday after you sign up, and it goes every day for that week. You’ll get a different scenario of a common classroom problem and a quick win that you can take to solving that, but also the resources to help you build up the foundation to support those challenges in a way that has longer lasting challenges effects, not just quick wins, but actually like solving the problem, supporting kids with their progress on that skill, right? You can sign up on kindergartencafe.org slash challenge at any time. And I’ll put the links below. But that is a great resource for you if you’re wanting more support with your social emotional learning.
[9:53] And I have other podcast episodes that can support you. And next week, we will be doing a case study on specifically like what to do if a child has really big emotions. So stay tuned for that episode.
[10:13] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then.