My jar of emotions
Give your preschooler a personalised transparent jar with their name on it.
Provide a bin with visualisation material in yellow, red, green and blue colours.
Examples of visualisation materials:
- Pom poms
- Play corn
- Water beads
- Lego bricks
- ...
Provide a good introduction emphasising the following:
- All feelings are allowed to be there. A feeling is not right or wrong.
- We experience several feelings in a day.
Be a model and give yourself and your partner a personal feelings jar too!
This will make talking about feelings even more approachable for your child.
With this jar, we show our feelings.
Look at the colour legend together and discuss:
- Yellow balls represent feeling happy.
- Red balls represent feeling angry.
- Green balls represent feeling scared.
- Blue balls represent feeling sad.
Now discuss together:
Whoever feels happy today may put yellow balls in their jar.
If you feel a little happy, put some yellow balls in your jar.
Are you feeling very happy? Then put lots of yellow balls in your feelings jar.
Now repeat this with the feelings angry, scared and sad, filling up each jar.
Tip:
Visualising an abstract feeling is not obvious for preschoolers. This does not go smoothly for everyone. Ideally, after a while their jar of emotions will be a fixture in your home and every child will be able to fill it independently.
