Games to Teach Kids About Emotions

Emotion is inherent to humans and comes naturally as children grow and develop. That doesn't mean there is no need to teach appropriate emotional behavior along the way, particularly for those children who may have trouble expressing themselves on an emotional level. This difficulty expressing emotion in some children may stem from a medical issue or it may simply be a lack of understanding. One way to address emotional expression is through games and activities designed to allow children to have fun while learning appropriate emotional interaction.

Emotion Matchup

• Cut a series of faces with various expressions of emotion. Sadness, happiness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise are examples of the different emotions to represent. Arrange the emotions on the table. Write several situations on an index card and place them in a jar. Shake the jar and have your child draw a card from the jar. Read the situation and have your child pick the photo that displays that emotion.

Making Faces

• Sit with your child at the kitchen table with a stack of index cards. Each card should have an emotion written on it. You and the child take turns pulling from the cards and making a face appropriate to the emotion on the card. Encourage your child to represent the emotion differently each time it is pulled to demonstrate the different facial expressions that might relate to a single emotion. To make the game fun, add a wild card marked "goofy" that allows the person selecting the card to try and make the goofiest face possible while the other player tries not to laugh.

Interactive Storytelling

• Make up stories with your child. The parent starts and draws an index card with an emotion on it. Begin making up a story. The scene you make up must be a scene that would put your main character in the emotional state you drew. When you finish, let your child draw a card and add to your story, making up a scene that connects with your story but incorporates the emotion the child drew. Continue this until you have finished the story together. Since there is no way to determine the emotion you draw, this can create a story that resembles an emotional roller coaster, with the emotions in the characters changing constantly.

Emotion Bingo

• Draw boxes on a sheet of paper and cut pictures of people showing different emotions from a magazine. Glue these pictures to the paper in random order. Write a list of corresponding emotions on slips of paper and place them in a jar, then randomly pull emotions from the jar and call them out. If a player has a picture of one of the emotions, place the slip of paper over that picture. The first player to fill a line across, up and down or diagonally wins.