Understanding Feelings for Elementary School Students | Tips for Self-Awareness & Emotional Control

Children experience all the same complicated, wonderful, confusing, and big emotions that adults do. It’s okay to feel all emotions, including feelings that are pleasant and uncomfortable.
As your child learned from our hedgehog friends, emotions are important because they provide us with information about ourselves and our environment, and they help us connect with one another. Learning how to notice, label, and express their feelings helps children feel more in control of their emotional experience.

Summary of the KEY SKILLS from the video:
• Label and name feelings to increase emotional vocabulary AND reinforce that
you can feel more than one emotion at a time.
• Notice body sensations that are attached to different emotions and provide clues for what we are feeling. Sometimes it’s easier to notice physical symptoms first.
• Rate the feeling of emotions on a scale of 1 to 10 to capture that we feel emotions in different amounts or intensities.

The California Healthy Minds, Thriving Kids Project is series of free, evidence-based video and print resources that caregivers and educators can use to teach their kids critical mental health and coping skills. The project was born of an innovative partnership between the state of California and the Child Mind Institute.
https://childmind.org/healthyminds