Getting kids to talk about their emotions plays a huge part in helping them to process those emotions, get past them and move on with their lives. When you can combine that process with candy, well that just creates an all-around great situation. That why we were so excited to come across the M&M emotion game at Living a Rad Life.
In this game, you use snack sized bags of chocolate covered candy (M&M’s) in order to get kids talking about their emotions. You and the child (or every child if you are working with a group) starts with one fun-sized bag of candy. On your turn, you pull one candy out of the bag and share an emotion/experience based on that color. Only after sharing do you actually get to eat the candy.
In this version of the game, you have to do one of the following depending on which candy you pull out of the bag:
- Red: Share something the makes you Happy
- Brown: Share something that makes you Sad
- Green: Share something that makes you Angry
- Yellow: Share something that makes you Excited
- Blue: Share one poor choice you’ve made today and what you could have done different
- Orange: Share one good choice you made today
And, the nice thing about this game is that you can change what needs to be shared depending on the circumstances. At the end of this article, I’ve share some templates we created using M&Ms and Skittles. Each template includes the sharing as described above as well as a “fill in the blank” template you can use however you need. Click on any of the images to link to a pdf file containing all four templates.
THE M&M FEELINGS GAME
THE SKITTLES FEELINGS GAME
THE M&M FEELINGS GAME – WITH BLANKS
THE SKITTLES FEELINGS GAME – WITH BLANKS
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This article is updated and adapted from an article originally published on Divorce Ministry 4 Kids on November 18, 2014.