Emotions Tab Workbook

I had a little boy tell me he wants to talk about his emotions in a fun way. He said he has a hard time matching his face to his emotions and explaining how the emotions feel. I started him off with an Emotions Foldable activity, which he absolutely loved. He said he was starting to practice “making the face match the feels” and wanted to talk about the emotions more.

So, I made this for him!

We single-sided printed the two situation pages for the cut and glue activity. We left the two situation pages intact.

We then printed out the Tab Workbook pages double-sided. We cut along the dotted lines on each page and then lined each up in the correct order.

Once we were sure that the pages were lined up correctly, we stapled down the left-hand side to create a spine for our Tab WorkBook.

After we had our book assembled, he wanted to cut out the situations and presort them all before we got started. I obliged and took the opportunity to discuss the emotions tied to each situation as he freed them one by one from the page.

We didn’t talk in-depth about the situation, just an initial reaction and he placed them into his emotion piles. He took the emotions chart I keep hanging on my wall, off the wall and placed it on the table to create headers for his different categories. We had used this poster before and he felt comfortable working with it.

I learned a lot about him from the way he sorted the situations based on how he would feel if he encountered the various scenarios.

The emotions poster I have hanging in my office matches the Inside Out colors (but makes no reference or connection to the movie). When I handed him his Tab Workbook, he started picking out colored pencils that were the same as the movie and my posters.

So, I followed suit and pulled out construction paper that matches each of the emotions to add a little color to the cut and glue activity (I included surprised and we use orange for that).

We took some time to review the colors of the emotions and catch up on life as we colored the cover of our Tab Workbook.

Once we finished the cover, we got down to the good stuff.

We started with the first emotion, happy. We discussed what being happy means, drew a self-portrait of us happy, explored what makes us happy, and talked about what it feels like to be happy. We answered the questions on the page and drew pictures together.

We looked at the pile of situations he had presorted for happiness and chose four situations that made him the happiest. We glued each of the four situations to their appropriate colored construction paper (in this case yellow).

Then we cut them into squares small enough to fit into the boxes printed on the Tab Workbook Page.

We then glued it under the chosen emotion’s page in the Tab WorkBook.

We really explored this emotion in depth.

We repeated this process for each emotion.

I think I may have learned more from him than he learned from me. He has a unique
way of looking at situations and opened my mind to a few emotions that situations
could evoke that I had not recognized before.