All this talk about social emotional learning may make you nervous. Sure, you say, I’m a professional…but I’m not a professional therapist. Fair point, but emotional intelligence can be taught–and you are a professional teacher.
All this to say that this next skill, labeling emotions, is the easiest to teach using traditional (read: non-therapy) teaching methods. Labeling emotions comes down to developing and using an extensive emotional vocabulary. And whomever you are (assuming you’re a teacher), you have a lot of experience with expanding student’s vocabularies.
Labeling Emotions: What it Means & Why it’s Important
We label an emotion when we describe it using the most precise word we can come up with. Contrast this to recognizing emotions, when we just locate the general vicinity of our emotion using the mood meter.
Accurately labeling our emotions helps us (and our students) in several ways:
- Labeling our emotion gives us a way to think about the emotion.
- It allows us to communicate our feelings to others, and ask them for support or help.
- It gives us a foundation for helping others who are experiencing difficult emotions.
- It gives us a way to connect with other people, whose emotionality becomes understandable and recognizable to us.
How Can I Help My Students Develop an Emotion Vocabulary?
This is the fun part! There are many ways to increase your student’s emotion vocabularies (you can preview some of the activities I’ve developed here). One of the easiest ways is to build an emotion vocabulary word wall:
You can design your word wall to look like a mood meter, and slowly place emotion words in each quadrant. Ask students to record emotion words they come across while reading during reading workshop on notecards. Then, they can place the words they’ve found on the word wall–that way it grows throughout the year!
I love the idea of a word wall, because it gives students a way to build their emotion vocabulary when they’re feeling relatively good, rather than asking them to learn new words when they are overcome by emotion. If you want to build your own word wall, check out the emotion cards included in this TpT unit.
What do you think of an emotion word wall? How do you help students develop their emotion vocabularies?
