The Mood Meter is a fun craft to build and gives kids a chance to gauge how they’re feeling at any given moment, and over time. Your mood meter can be as simple or as involved as you want and is a nice alternative to a traditional emotion chart. We borrowed this wonderful idea from Education.com and encourage you to check out their website for more great ideas.

What Do You Need to Make a Mood Meter

Use your creativity to make your own personal mood meter. The following represents what we did:

• White poster board.
• Ruler
• Compass (helpful for getting your circle right)
• Construction Paper (you can match the emotions you are including in your charge, but you will definitely want a darker color to use for the arrow).
• A metal brad/fastener.
• Markers or crayons

The Color Wheel of Emotions provides kids and teens an artistic outlet for exploring their emotions. It also provides a golden opportunity to talk about those emotions with them. Although a simple exercise, the Color Wheel of Emotion hits on most of the aspects of the The Super Simple Feelings Management Technique – particularly the “Talk About It!” component. And, the best part is, you don’t even have to be a good artist to do it. The color wheel above was done by my (at the time) 13 year old daughter Lyndsey.

Supplies

• White piece of paper or poster board.
• Colored pencils, crayons or markers.

How to Make a Color Wheel of Emotions

Pool Noodle Fidget Toys are an easy DIY project you can make for, or with, your kids. They are cheaper than fidget spinners, squishies and other fidget toys, and you can mass produce them with relative ease. I’ve worked with kids for years, and for many of those years I was in charge of games with a large group of students. Ever since that time, I’ve kept a box of pool noodles in my basement, because you never know when you’re going to need them! (FYI, you can get a box fairly cheap after summer is over). A standard pool noodle can be used to create 42 fidget toys. Here’s all you need to know:

63 inches – 42 stress relievers

Items Need For Project

• Pool Noodles
• Scissors or a Knife
• Ruler
• Pencil

Emotion Face Plates are a fun way to get kids thinking about what emotions look like. Emotion Face Plates are an easy project that you can do with objects lying around your house, and once you get kids started, it is something they can continue to work on by themselves.

Supply Listing for Emotion Face Plates

This is a fairly simple task. All you need is:

• Paper plates (that you can write on).
• Markers, pens or crayons.
• Scissors (if you want to make the half-plate emotion faces).

With Easter coming up soon, it’s a great time to stock up on empty Easter Eggs. These Emotion Egg Faces are a simple, fun and captivating way to help kids learn about, and express, emotions. They can be utilized for several of the steps in the The Super Simple Feelings Management Technique.

How to Make Emotion Egg Faces

• All you need for this craft is empty Easter Eggs, a marker and some clay or play-doh (optional).
• Draw a different emotion face on each Easter Egg. The eyes and the nose should go on the top half of the egg with the mouth on the bottom.
• Put a piece of clay in the bottom of each egg. This helps them to stand up better (you can see we used stands made out of pool noodle for the picture above)

How to Use Emotion Egg Faces

The emotions paper chain is a fun craft you can do with kids and can be a crucial part of the Talk About It! component of The Super Simple Feelings Management Technique.

What You Need to Make An Emotion Paper Chain

1. Various colors of construction paper.
2. Scissors
3. A marker, pen, pencil or crayons.
4. Tape or glue

How To Make an Emotion Paper Chain

Emotion Color Swatches are a cheap and easy way to teach kids different words for emotions and different degrees of emotions.

Here’s how to make them:

• Go to your local hardware store or pain store and get a variety of paint samples that show three or four different intensities of a color on one sheet (we used samples that showed four colors).
• On each sample, write words that represent varying degrees of emotions going from least intense (lightest color) to most intense (darkest color).
• You can make up your own groupings or use the ones we’ve developed which are shown below (you can access a printable copy of by clicking on the worksheet below). We grouped our emotions as well (e.g., red samples related to emotions in the “anger” category, yellow was “joyous” emotions, blue for emotions related to “sad” as so on).
• Once all of our samples were done, we bound them using a metal ring.

Here’s how to use them:

There are a number of ways you can use the Emotions Color Swatches to help teach kids about emotions:

The Elephant Noise Maker is a fun and useful tool for teaching kids deep breathing techniques. Deep breathing is a key coping skill and one of the Soothing Coping Skills covered in Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff.

In the past we have drawn a picture of an elephant on a piece of heavy paper or cardboard to create our elephant noise makers. With this new template you can either use the picture to trace on something more durable or simply cut the elephant out and use the template itself.

Here’s are the instructions:

1.Cut out the elephant from the template. Either trace the elephant on to heavy duty paper or cardboard if desired or use the elephant from the template.

Grief and worry can often leave young people feeling all alone and isolated. The Shield of Strength is a fun craft and activity to get kids thinking about their own assets and other people in their lives that can be there to help them when they need it the most. You can click on the picture above to get a downloadable template for the Shield of Strength as well as the instructions.

Here’s how it works:

1. Draw a shield pattern like the one above on a large piece of cardboard or poster board.
2. Divide the shield into four sections by drawing a horizontal and vertical line.
3. Label the four quadrants as “Family,” “Friends,” “Skills” and “Others.”
4. Cut the shield out.
5. Write people or skills/abilities in each section that can help to protect you or help you feel better when you’re feeling down.
6. Keep the shield as a reminder that you are never alone in the struggles and difficulties that you face.
7. Instead of making a large shield, you can use the template on the following page to create a smaller version.

Empathy is a critical skill for kids to develop and one of the hallmarks of emotional healing as detailed in the Grand Feelings Exit Plan (Signs of Emotional Health). The Empathy Map is a great way to get kids thinking about and understanding empathy for others. It is adapted from a business setting where it is used to understand clients but works great with kids.

Here’s What You Need

• A large sheet of paper or a board.
• Markers.
• Sticky notes.
• Pen/Pencil

Here’s How To Set Up the Empathy Map (as shown above)