Emotional literacy is a really important topic that all children should be learning as soon as they understand language.
As you may know by now, children have big emotions over the littlest of things! Especially young toddlers whose brains are underdeveloped. Their anger can turn into an instant tantrum at the blink of an eye.
I personally will describe and label the emotions as I see it, e.g. “You are frowning, you look worried.” “You are crying, it seems that you may be feeling sad.” This won’t stop them from feeling the way they do, but it does give them the language to describe to you in the future what they are feeling, and you can also pre-empt their big emotions before they occur. ABC Kids have a nice and simple series called Moodies that illustrate the common emotions in a simple and child-friendly manner. The movie Inside Out remains one of our family favourite movie about emotions.
To help my children understand emotions and to teach them emotional literacy, I created these Chinese English bilingual flashcards as part of our thematic lesson into emotions.
Such a great resource! Thank you for explaining how you used the cards, because I’m usually totally uninterested in flashcards. This use of them seems much more useful and fun than just plain memorization.
Thanks Breanna! I’m glad you found the tips helpful! I think flashcards are seriously underrated as a teaching tool. Sometimes we just need to be a bit more creative. 😁