Sesame Street Activity of the Week: Picture Your Emotions
By Rosemarie Truglio, PhD. Senior Vice President, Curriculum & Content, Sesame Workshop
Skill Focus: Help Children Manage Emotions
Children are experiencing a wide range of emotions right now. It’s important for them to learn to express their feelings in a healthy way. Drawing is a creative way to learn feeling words and to share how we feel.
Draw Your Feelings
Encourage your child to draw “how they feel,” and use the pictures to talk about all the feelings — big and small — they’re having.
Using “feelings words” like frustrated, excited, angry, or worried helps build an emotions vocabulary and gives children a label for what they’re feeling: an important first step in managing a big emotion.
Family Time
Ask siblings to draw each other’s feelings.
From Drawing to Picture Book
Ask your child to tell you what to write on each picture — then, together, you can bind the pages and add the book to their personal library.
Watch Rosita do it! Rosita is feeling very grouchy because she’s frustrated — she can’t go to school, play with her friends, or visit her Abuela. In her story she shares how focusing on all the things she CAN Do shifts her mood and helps her feel better! Rosita wrote her own book — maybe her story will inspire your child to become an author, too!
Related Resources
These are stressful days for families everywhere, and Sesame Workshop is here to help. With 50 years’ experience in early childhood education and in helping children and their caregivers face challenging times, we’ve created an online hub of resources that parents can use at home to spark playful learning, offer children comfort, and focus a bit on self-care, too. Each week, as we roll out new content, a Sesame Workshop early childhood development expert will contribute a column here with strategies to help families find ways to breathe, laugh, and play together.
