Who doesn’t love a ball pit? With the Feelings Ball Pit you can bring all the fun of a ball pit to older kids and teach them about their feelings at the same time. Depending on how you play, you can help kids to explore all five components of the The Super Simple Feelings Management Technique.

Supplies for Making a Feelings Ball Pit

• You will need standard ball pit balls. You can get them on Amazon, but they can be pricey. We got ours on the Wish app for significantly less (they took longer to get here, but it’s worth it for the savings if you plan ahead).
• Markers
• A container large enough to be the pit for the ball pit. It doesn’t have to be large enough that you can actually climb in (that would be fun), but it should be large enough to allow kids to dig through the balls.
• A set of our Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotion Cards (for Versions #1 & #2 of the game below).
• A set of our Super Simple Feelings Management Technique Activity Cards (for Versions #2 & #3 of the game below).
• A set of our I Feel Scenario Cards (for Version #3 of the game below)

Preparing the Game and Setting Up to Play

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Active coping skills are an important part of Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff Coping Tool Box. The Over and Under Obstacle Course is a fun way to help kids deal with difficult emotions and can be a powerful visual reminder that life events can be like an obstacle course. There will be ups and downs, but the most important thing is to keep going.

Setting Up Your Obstacle Course

• Use you imagination. Your obstacle course can be inside or outside.
• If you’re building inside, use furniture, cushions, blankets, doors and anything else you can think of to use.
• These obstacle course also work in an education setting. Use desks, books, doors and other items in the room.
• If you’re working outside, use playground equipment, toys, sporting equipment, leaves, creeks, etc. to build your course.
• Try to make your course doable but make sure it requires some effort on the child’s part.

Using Your Obstacle Course to Reinforce Emotional Resilience

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The Emotions Spoon Race is a fun and active way to help kids to better understand their emotions. It combines all the fun a traditional egg on spoons relay race with an improved emotional vocabulary and awareness. Make sure to check out our video from the first time we played this game at the bottom of this post.

What You’ll Need for the Emotions Spoon Race

• A package of ping-pong balls. We actually used balls which don’t officially qualify as ping-pong balls. They’re a lot cheaper and actually easier to write on. We used white ping-pong balls this time, but I also bought a package of colored ones.
• A bucket or container for the ping-pong balls.
• A listing of emotion words. We selected 68 words to include. A listing of those words is can be found here.
• A fine tip marker to write on the balls.
• Spoons
• Hula Hoops, buckets or something else to collect the balls the racers carry.
• A copy of our Super Simple Feelings Management Technique Activity Cards.

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The Row Row Row Your Boat Emotion Game is a fun way to talk to kids about emotions and what they sound like. It can be a valuable tool in the The Super Simple Feelings Management Technique for See It, Say It and Mimic It. Here’s how it works:

1. Use a set of emotion cards, an emotion chart or just your own imagination to throw out an emotion to another player.
2. The player must hum the song Row Row Row your boat sounding like the emotion given.
3. Laugh and have fun.

It’s that simple! You can use whatever song you want, but we selected Row Row Row Your Boat as a song that virtually everyone knows. A fun game to play if you have a deck of emotion cards (the Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotion cards are coming soon) would be to have the player select the emotion then have the other plays guess the emotion being hummed. You could also have the player pick the song they will be doing and have other player name both the emotion and the song. Break into teams and see how many each team can get in a given amount of time.

Credit to my 10-year-old Nathan who helped me come up with this game over dinner after soccer practice. Here’s a little video we made demonstrating the game. Please forgive the poor sound quality – it’s the best we could get with a phone and sitting at Arby’s!

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These Super Simple Feelings Management Technique Activity Cards are based on Hope 4 Hurting Kids’ Super Simple Feelings Management Technique to help with emotional understanding and regulation. They are designed to be used with a variety of emotions listings of games (see a partial list above) to help young people master the five skills involved in the  Super Simple Feelings Management Technique:

1. See It!
2. Say It!
3. Feel It!
4. Mimic It!
5. Talk About It!

There are nine cards for each of the five components that will help young people to better recognize, understand and talk about their emotions. The pdf file also includes a set of blank cards if you wish to add your own activities to the pile.

How To Play

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The Emotion Mix Up Game is a fun way to really get kids and young people thinking about emotion by having them imagine what it would look like to have a less obvious emotion in reaction to a particular circumstance. Although it is similar to the Feelings Ball Toss game, it adds a fun twist that will get kids thinking about their emotions and the scenarios that cause them.

Here’s What You Need:

• Last week we looked at the Feelings Ball Toss / Emotions Sorting activity. You’ll use the colored bowls and the balls from that game.
• You will use a set of the Scenario Cards (I Feel) sorted by color. The colors will hopefully match the color of the bowls. If not, you can improvise.

Here’s How To Play:

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Feelings Ball Toss is a fun activity to play with kids to help them understand different emotions. The great part about the game is that it can be played a number of different ways.

Here’s How To Set It Up

• Get a series of bowls or tubs. We used the different colored bowls shown about that we got at Dollar Tree for a buck a piece.
• Label each bowl with a different emotions. You can write the emotion or draw a picture using marker, but we opted to print various emojis and tape them inside the bowls.
• Get some sort of soft ball or object that can be tossed into the bowls. We bought a set of 12 puffer balls on amazon that we use for the game. In addition to not bouncing and rolling as much as regular balls, they’re also a nice stress reliever for the kids.
• Set the bowls on one side of the room (up against a wall works well as a makeshift backboard).
• Have the kids stand at the other side of the room with a ball.

Here’s How to Play

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Leave the Room is a fun game to play with kids and teens to help them better understand their emotions, and it’s simple to set up and play. You can play it in a one-on-one situation, but it’s most fun in a small group.

Here’s how it works:

1. Send one person out of the room (the guesser).
2. Pick an emotion and let the remaining kids (and adults) in the room know what the emotion is. You may need to help younger kids who aren’t familiar with the emotion you’ve selected.
3. Explain that everyone should act out the emotion (either with or without making sound depending on how you’re playing).
4. Have the guesser come back in the room and try to guess the emotion.

For a fun variation, tell the people acting out the emotion that they can only use their face.

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Fidget Spinners are all the rage, and now Fidget Spinner Emotions will let you use a fidget spinner to help kids better understand and deal with their emotions. With kids ranging from 10 into their upper teens, I have seen first hand how they are all drawn to fidget spinners, and truth-be-told, I have a collection of them myself (though I tell people it’s only because of my work with kids).

How it works

1. Cut out the arrow pointer(s) you want to use.
2. Cut out the dotted circle and place the arrow pointer over the center of your fidget spinner. Use a piece of tape to attach it to the fidget spinner.
3. Place the fidget spinner over the gray fidget spinner outline in the middle of the emotions circle.
4. Spin the fidget spinner. When it stops, do one of the following based on the emotion the spinner lands on: Continue reading

Feelings pong is a fun game to play and easy to set up – all you need is a table some cups and ping-pong ball. It is another great activity to use with the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique to help kids and teens to better understand and deal with the emotions they face.

Here’s what you need:

1. Plastic cups (9, 13, 18 or 24 cups work best for a pyramid). We used multi-colored cups so each color represented a group of emotions but that isn’t necessary for the game.
2. Ping-Pong balls.
3. Permanent Marker.

Here’s how it works. Continue reading