Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Emotions

One of the lessons I taught when I first got to the preschool was over emotions.  Because the kiddies already had such a strong "Feelings" vocabulary, I decided to dive deep into the emotional sea.  The two words they liked saying the best is frustrated and disappointed.  It's quite cute hearing their little voices yell out "Frustrated!"  It seems so sophisticated for a six year old.

  As an English teacher, I am often looking for good Emotion charts with pictures as it is an important lesson for any learner of a second language to learn so as to express themselves.  This gave me the idea to not only make my own charts as tools in future lessons, but also as a way for the kids to put the emotions to practice.  They really enjoyed it.

  At first I had a real system where they had to pick an emotion out of a hat and act it out for the camera.  But as I started making the charts, I realized that I was missing specific emotions so I would yell out, "who wants to do angry?" and a few of them would volunteer.  Usually, they preferred the happier emotions so I would have to go searching for someone willing to act for me. Some of them were better at acting than others.  One of the little boys, Peter, seemed to make the same face over an over no matter if it were happy or sad.  I could see he was concentrating but the emotion just wasn't transferring from his brain to his face. My pantomiming skills really came in handy here.

There are three emotions charts.  Most of the emotions have two kids demonstrating with two exceptions.  Excited has four excited kiddos and surprised as the two teachers, including yours truly, just for fun.  I have listed the emotions down below each chart out of order, so that you can try and guess for yourself which face goes with which emotion.  Let me know what you think or if you have any questions about which goes to which.  Some of them aren't that clear to be honest, but there are fuzzy lines between certain emotions such as frustrated, worried and angry in real life.  Have fun and I look forward to hearing your opinions on this little venture.  p.s. for the sake of simplicity we taught jealousy as "jealous of a person" and envious as "envious of a thing." 

(click on the photos to see them enlarged for better accuracy guessing)

Scared, shy, loved, sick, crazy, disappointed, thirsty, sleepy-

Proud, happy, excited, grateful, embarrassed, sad, hungry
worried, frustrated, angry, jealous, envious, surprised

2 comments:

Karen said...

This is such a cute and effective teaching method, Vanessa! Good job!

corinda said...

heyy vanessa wowie your blog looks so cool and you experience so much.. we met ones in buenos aires 3years ago.. i'm now in new zeeland, traveling around with my boyfriend (still the swissguy. it's great over here, just mss a diferent culture. but soon we gonna go to asia.. yeh.. wel enjoy christmas en each others love. big kiss corinda (holanda)