Emotion Detectives

The Hoot Owls have been doing some social emotional activities inspired by the book A Little Spot of Feelings by Diane Alber. The book uses child-friendly language to talk about feelings and emotions, which it calls “feeling spots.”

The Hoot Owls have been working to become emotion detectives, practicing naming emotions and spotting their own emotions by paying attention to facial expressions, body language and tone of voice. The class first learned about their calm spot, and how to change from a difficult emotion, like sadness, anger or anxiety, back to their calm spot. They also discussed happiness, love and confidence. 

Next, the Hoot Owls painted some of the feeling spots: sadness, anger, happiness, confidence, peaceful, and loved. The students drew faces on the feeling spots and some of them wrote the names of each spot.

The Hoot Owls also turned the feeling spots into stick puppets. They then practiced role playing with the stick puppets in class.

With Maggie, the Hoot Owls read A Little Scribble Spot, also by Diane Alber. They used wiki sticks to create their own scribble spots, symbolizing when one is mixed up and doesn’t know how they feel. The Hoot Owls will continue to work on identifying their emotions as well as their friends’ emotions by being emotion detectives and looking for clues (like facial expressions, body language and tone of voice) for the rest of the year.

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