The movie Inside Out has been great for those of us working to help kids better understand and deal with their emotions. In addition to being a great movie, it has sparked a litany of crafts and games to go along with it. These crafts and activities can help kids to better understand the emotions they are feeling. The Inside Out Mood Board is one of those activities and is a fun way for kids who like the movie to track their emotions.

Supplies Needed for an Inside Out Mood Board

We originally found this idea on the Eighteen 25 website. We love their mood board, but we made some minor modifications to the one we built. These changes were mainly due to the materials we had on hand and because we like the idea of using a white board. Here’s what we used:

• A magnetic white board purchased from a local dollar store.
• Construction paper (you’ll need red, yellow, purple, green and blue to match the characters from the movie).
• Circular cake boards purchased from a local hobby store to serve as the backing for the character.
• Glue.
• Adhesive magnets to attach to the back of the emotions.

If your kids are like mine, they like to look at themselves in the mirror. They like to make funny faces, and when they were younger it was uncommon to find them in the bathroom making themselves laugh by what they saw in the mirror. Mirror Mirror is a fun game that builds on that to help kids learn and practice what emotions look like. These are the important “See It” and “Mimic It” phases of the The Super Simple Feelings Management Technique.

Items Need to Play

You don’t need much to play this game. All you need is

• A mirror (one on the wall is fine for one child, but if you’re playing with a group you might want hand mirrors).
• A list of emotion words (our Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotion Cards or the My Feelings Workbook are great if you need help.)

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

A significant part of helping kids to deal with their emotions (Jump In! Stand Strong! Rise Up!) is helping them to develop a robust feelings vocabulary. That is why we are excited to present our very own set of Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotion Cards.

What Are Emotion Cards?

Each of these 54 cards includes the name of an emotion, a face demonstrating that emotion, and a brief definition of the feeling. Definition have been taken from, or adapted from entries in the WordNet® lexical database of English. The emotions included in this deck of feelings cards were extracted from our upcoming book 150 Emotions Every Kids Should Know – By Age (coming, hopefully, in late 2018).

How Do I Get These Cards?

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

Fishing for Feelings is a fun game to play with kids to help them learn about emotions. With our template and a few magnets, you can create a game that will help preschool through elementary aged kids to Jump In! Stand Strong! Rise Up! Fishing for feelings is a great game to help kids start to master the skills included in the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique

Here’s how Fishing for Feelings works.

First download our easy to use template by clicking here or on the picture of the template to the right. Follow the instructions in the template for creating the emotion circles and playing the game.

We bought pre-made reinforced circles at Hobby Lobby and colorful magnets for minimal cost to make the game more aesthetically pleasing, but you can certainly cut your own reinforcing circles and use other magnets if you prefer. (NOTE: the link included for magnets are white as we found the color ones in our local store, but they are not available online)

We are excited to announce that at Hope 4 Hurting Kids we are hard at work on a new resource, and we are excited today to give you a sneak peek. Tentatively named “150 Emotion Words Every Child Should Know – By Age,” we hope to have this resource completed and ready for you by Spring or early Summary of 2018.

Step 2 of the Jump In! portion of our Comprehensive Emotional Management System here at Hope 4 Hurting Kids, is “Say It!” Say It! is all about helping kids to develop a robust emotional vocabulary, and we set out to create a resource to help parents and other adults to just that. While still in the developmental stage, “150 Emotion Words Every Child Should Know – By Age” will be a collection of 150 emotions, grouped by age, that every kid should know. Each entry will explore one emotion in-depth including a kid friendly definition, related emotion words, opposites and examples to help parents and other adults talk to kids about each emotion.  Additionally, emotions are grouped by age to give parents and other adults a way of gauging a particular child’s progress in understanding and naming emotions.

If you are interested in receiving a link to this resource when it is available, please fill out the short form below. This is not a “give something away free – then inundate you with emails” scheme. We simply want to make sure that if you are interested in the resource now, we get it to you when it finally comes available.