Feelings Puppets

Recognizing and identifying emotions is a very important skill for kids. It is the foundation for empathy, a basic for anti-bullying programs as well as an important skill for daily interaction. It is necessary in order to understand literature and history completely. It’s on the tests.

But how to do it?

Here’s an easy project to support this skill: Feelings Puppets.

To make these Feelings Puppets, you will need just a few things:

• ice cream spoons or craft sticks
• circle-shaped cutouts — buy them in the crafts store, or cut them yourself
• glue or glue dots
• markers

We just drew faces showing different expressions onto the paper circles and glued them onto the craft spoons. Then we labeled them on the back.

We keep a whole set of these in a bag, ready to pull out for lessons. When we’re going to read a story or tell an episode from history, we give one each to as many kids as possible in the group.

But you can also have each student make a set. They can then keep their own set handy for all kinds of purposes.

If you want little children to make their own, you might want to start with a review of how faces can show emotions. Ask students to look at your face and guess how you feel as you model different emotions. Then choose students to come up and do the same. Once the point is clear, have everyone make a collection of Feelings Puppets.

Once your puppets are complete, you can use them for a number of different things:

• When you read a story aloud, have students hold up the puppet that shows how the main character feels. Tell them to change the puppet every time the feelings change. Remy Charlips’ book Fortunately would be a great book to practice this with the first time. The story says “Fortunately” some good thing happened; on the next page, “unfortunately,” some bad thing happened. With a clear change of emotional climate on every page, students will easily understand how to use the Feelings Puppets. Once they’ve got the concept, you can use this as a focusing activity with all read-alouds — it even gives you a quick spot check for comprehension.
• Explore point-of-view with the puppets. A single event in a book can be experienced differently by different characters. Say you’re reading “Jack in the Beanstalk.”  How did Jack feel when he escaped with the giant’s singing harp? How did the giant feel? How did the harp feel? How did Jack’s mother feel? This works just as well with Shakespeare.
• Make a class collection and add to it as you encounter new and perhaps complicated feelings in books or discussions. You may begin kindergarten with “happy” and “sad” and end up with “startled” and “perplexed.” Challenge other classes to see who can make the largest collection. This is great for vocabulary, too!
• Use them to help with complicated history lessons. For example, when we study Native Americans in Arkansas, we think about how the Osage felt here in their hunting grounds. Then how they felt as the Cherokee moved in. Then how the Cherokee felt about the Osage’s unwelcoming presence, when they had been promised land to replace their lands in Tennessee and Georgia. Write summary sentences on sentence strips, place in a pocket chart, and add emotion puppets.
• Use them with reader’s theater. It could be fun to make them larger, even mask-sized, for this purpose. Paper plates can work well for the cut-outs if you do this.
• You can use them for classroom management as well. Have students silently turn up a sad (or puzzled or other appropriate feeling) puppet on their desks when they need help. Once you help them, turn up a happy puppet. This allows you to monitor how students are doing without distracting those who are working.
• Hold up your own Feelings Puppets to show when you are not pleased with the noise level in the classroom, or delighted by all the exciting busy work going on. Again, this doesn’t add to the noise level or disrupt the work.

Do you have more ideas? I would love to hear them!