Teaching Emotional Intelligence to Children Part 2: Facing Our Feelings - with crafts!

No, we’re not knitting away our sadness or sculpting our fears - at least not today. We are feeling some more feelings, assisted by one of our favorite craft projects: the emotions face!

LOVE these things! Use them a million ways:

• Draw attention to all the different parts of our bodies (particularly faces) that we use to show emotion - whether we realize it or not.
• Make an expressive face showing an emotion, and ask the kids try to copy it with their emotion faces.
• Adjust your emotion face to show a feeling and ask the kids to guess what emotion the face is showing.
• Ask the kids to copy each other's expressive faces on their emotion faces. 
• Give kids small mirrors and ask them to copy their own expressive faces.
• Ask the children to show feelings on their emotions face, then draw those faces on a separate piece of paper and label them with the appropriate emotion.
• Use during story time - "who can show me on the emotion face how you think the bunny is feeling?"
• Once the children are used to them, incorporate them into self-regulation and problem-solving
  • "Can you show me on the emotions face how you are feeling/how you think your friend feels/how you would feel if... "
  • or "I notice that your face looks like the angry face [display on emotions face]. Did I read your face correctly; is that how you are feeling? How can we help you feel like this face [display happy emotions face]?"​

And many more. But before you can use them, we need to make them....

Get Ready to Craft!

Assemble:

• Face and Feature Template (download below)
• Scissors
• Hole punch
• Crayons/markers for decorating face
• Brass fasteners
• Base material: cardboard, cardstock, paper plates, or other. See below.

If you plan to make one face durable enough for the whole class to play with, go with cardboard - cut out cardboard to glue the paper face and features onto. 
​
If you're making several faces, I say skip the cardboard in favor of cheap paper plates. We love to have the kids each make their own Emotions Face, so our execution doesn’t need to be highly durable so much as highly do-able in repetition. 

Ok.... it's also because more pliable materials reduce scissor fatigue - or whatever it’s called when you’ve been cutting out so many things, or cutting such hard-to-cut things, that the shape of the scissor handle becomes permanently imprinted around the base of your thumb….

Instead, I prefer a material that can be bent and cut, and have holes punched in it, with relative ease.

Cardboard does not meet this standard for me, so grab some cheap plain paper plates from your local pizzeria (or order them). Bonus: they are already face shaped, which saves time cutting out a lot of blank face circles!

Our hole punchers can’t reach more than an inch or two beyond the border of the face. So unless you have a very fancy long-necked hole punching device, you’ll need to fold the face in order to punch holes in it to attach the features.

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Full credit to Mr. Printables for creating the template pictured above! Downloadable right here:

emotions face blank template.pdf
File Size:	68 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

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Make A Face!

Paper Plate Edition...

We often skip the tears/cheeks as I feel they can be more hassle than useful (plenty of ways to show sad without actual crying), but some people like them. If you want to use the cheeks/tears, glue them back-to-back. Then thread a needle with thread or skinny yarn through the top of the cheek/tear pair.

• You can put make a small hole in the face with the needle and put both ends of the thread through that hole on the face; tape the thread ends very securely to the back of the face. I think my fingers are too big to do this but you may have better luck.
  
• Or you can tie off thread ends into a loop, punch holes for brass fasteners above the cheek area, then place the thread loop over fastener; loose enough to be able to flip the cheeks into tears, but small enough that the cheek won’t droop down to the chin when you attach it.
  

(If you discover a simpler way to do this, I’d love to hear about it.)  

Alternative: If you’re willing to eventually lose/squash some of the facial features when they are not attached, to sacrifice a little precision in the manipulating of the features, and to invite Mr Potato Head style feature-swapping, you could ditch all the hole punching and fasteners and just use velcro dots to attach all the features.

All Done!

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