Emotions

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=__**Emotional Charades**__=


 * Purpose:** To discuss emotions and non-verbal cues


 * Lesson:** Hand kids slips of paper with emotional words and have them. (ex: frustrated, embarrassed, proud, surprised, excited). Taking turns, each student will act out an emotion on a card and their partner / rest of the class will have to guess.

After the activity, the class can discuss the experience of acting out an emotion. This is a good opportunity to talk about picking up on non-verbal cues. (You can go back through the slips and discuss specific cues for specific feelings.) This might also be an opportunity for discussing how to express feelings so others understand how you might feel.

You can find a list of many basic emotions at changingminds.org.


 * Additional notes:**


 * Add your own additional notes:** I found it helpful to give the actor a 5 second "head-start." That is, no one can start guessing for 5 seconds.

=__**Emotional $10,000 Pyramid**__=


 * Purpose:** To discuss emotions and emotional vocabulary


 * Lesson:** This lesson is very similar to "Emotional Charades." (You may want to show the kids an example of this old game show, if they are not familiar with the format.) Hand kids slips of paper with emotional words and have them. (ex: frustrated, embarrassed, proud, surprised, excited). Taking turns, each student will describe a situation in which they might feel this way and their partner / rest of the class will have to guess.

After the activity, the class can discuss how difficult it is to put emotions into words. This might also be an opportunity for discussing how to express feelings so others understand how you might feel.

The attachment below has a series of slips of paper with different emotions on each slip. Feel free to download, or to make up your own! You can find a list of many basic emotions at changingminds.org.


 * Additional notes:**


 * Add your own additional notes:**

=__**"1 Uninterrupted Minute"**__=


 * Purpose:** Getting students to answer questions, in a game format, they might not be as comfortable answering in a standard discussion.


 * Lesson:** You go around the circle with each student, in turn, picking a random card from the set of cards. The game is driven by three main rules:

1. "You get the card you get" whether you "like" the question or not. 2. You have to answer seriously. 3. When it's your turn you get one uninterrupted minute to say anything you want to say in response to the question. No one else can chime in.

After the student's minute is up, others can respond, either with their own answers or commenting on what has been said so far.

The attachment below has some question cards from the classic group counseling game "Ungame"; you can also make up your own. Note: Nico has the actual cards if you want to borrow them instead of just printing out the attachments.




 * Additional notes:**
 * It's important not to let students opt out of a question too easily -- often they have something to say, even if they don't know it. Wait them out.
 * It's also important to enforce that no one else can speak for at least one minute, so that the student with the card has the floor and can take time to think, if they need, without worrying about losing their turn.
 * Students tend to be willing to answer the questions because it feels like the questions weren't selected by an adult -- they were selected by "the game." I can generally get through about 8 cards in one Advisory lesson.


 * Add your own additional notes:**

=**__"Peeling The Onion"__**=


 * Purpose:** To show students that when they think they, or someone, is "mad" there is always something more specific that the person is feeling because "anger" always carries with it a derivative emotion -- and that so many feelings look, on the surface, like "just anger" when they are in fact really something else. You are getting students to get past naming everything as "sad, glad, mad" and to develop more of a "feelings vocabulary."


 * Lesson:** This is a combination of Socratic discussion and small group work. Put forth the idea of how emotions are sometimes like an onion, where you can peel away one layer to uncover another. Then explain that there is always a more specific emotion underneath "anger" and give an example, such as:


 * When a child runs into traffic and mom yells, "I've told you not to run out into the street!" she appears to be angry but she is really feeling _ (scared).


 * When a teacher criticizes a student in front of the class and the student seems to be mad about it, the emotion the student is really experiencing is feeling _ (embarrassed/humiliated).

Once they get the idea, in pairs or in groups of 3, students can then be challenged to come up with examples and scenarios where "It looks like anger, but it's actually _." The challenge for the entire group is to see how many different feelings they can identify as "looking like anger, but..."


 * Additional notes:**


 * Sometimes in the initial discussion, I present a "challenge," challenging students to come up with an example where the person is mad and there is no other feeling you can "peel the onion" and find. Assuming you don't allow cop-outs like "Veronica is just mad for no reason," you can always win this challenge.


 * This lesson works great for both genders, but is probably more "classically" meant for boys in that boys often have more of a specific need to develop a wider "feelings vocabulary" and this lesson accomplishes that goal.


 * Add your own additional notes:**