Teaching Emotions in the Classroom

Many times, if young children are unable to act empathetic towards their siblings, friends, and classmates, it is not because they do not feel empathy, it is simply because they do not have the correct vocabulary to communicate their emotions.

Teaching children emotional vocabulary is a key part of conflict education at a young age.  For a group activity, ask children: “What does feeling happy feel like? Look like? What color is it? What animal is a happy animal? What does feeling angry feel like? Look like? What color is it? What animal is an angry animal? How do we act when we are happy? When we are angry? How do we treat otherpeople?” Act these feelings and actions out in role-play, and role-play alternative responses.

One teacher of four-year-olds was having trouble with arguments and fighting in her class. She felt that she had to address the problem directly with the entire group, as well as individually, if she was to see consistent results. She writes this about her experience:

This year in the Pre-K class we began by identifying feelings. We talked about how various situations make us feel. Our goal is to encourage the children to use words to express feelings and thus to avoid some confrontations and conflicts. One activity to encourage talking about feelings was the following: Each child made stick puppets whose faces reflected basic emotions (happy, sad, mad). We discussed various situations (when a friend hurts you, when you have pizza for lunch, when a parent is sick, when you spend time with a grandparent…) and the children used the puppets to display how they would feel.

As a follow-up to this, we now have the children express their feelings, following a conflict, come up with a solution, shake hands to show they agree with it, and plan how to implement the solution. For example, following a physical argument between two children, they talked about why they were pushing and what they could do to make each other feel better. The solution was to listen when one person was asking the other something. The children made up with a hug and a handshake.

Give children a vocabulary for their emotions

Give children a vocabulary for their emotions so that they can name their feelings. An excellent tool for helping children to identify their emotions is the Emotions Poster available through Childswork/Childsplay. It features photos of real kids expressing 28 different feelings.

Children may not have the word for what they are feeling, but they may recognize the emotion in the expression on a child’s face. Ask children to point to the face that best expresses their own feeling. Give them the label for that feeling, using it as a springboard for discussion.

By helping children understand the names of their emotions, they can better communicate those emotions and better deal with conflict.

What Will 2013 Bring For Education?

As the time is passing, we all have witnessed many changes and many things have changed since past few decades. There has been a lot of change since the inception of internet and web. People’s way of living and doing things has changed. Life; in short has evolved in past few years. But what lies ahead? What is next? After so many things have changed, what else remains to be seen?

In this article we will see the impact of these changes on education, we will also discuss that whether the changes on education has been good or bad and further what impact can be seen on education in year 2013. The first thing we need to analyze is that what impact education had gone through. If we compare the era of our parents with that of ours, we can see that education has made progress in leaps and now the kind of education we are having is totally different and a lot has changed in these years.

Way of doing custom coursework and assignments has changed. The importance of course work has increased and the nature of the work has changed too. This era is marked with competition and survival of fittest. Only those who are able to survive in this race are the ones who get to live a better life. In this sense, world has become a more cruel place to live in, with only those with the power surviving. Power here determines not only the money, but skills and talent.

In all these years we have seen that everything is now linked with internet, students get their assignments and custom coursework all on internet and college portal or slate. The way of doing and assigning things has changed, and those who cannot adapt to this change cannot survive. Now the expectations from the students have increased too. In recent years a lot of news has been in buzz about plagiarism and college drop outs. The issue of plagiarism has been in hype in recent times and many people believe that students are to be blamed for this act.

The impact on education has been that the importance of education has increased; many private schools and colleges are coming up and the competition to get in a good college in immense. Students try really hard to get in a good college, and once they get in they struggle hard to remain in college. Many students do part time job along with the studies and this is the reason that many students are not able to complete their college. Despite of the fact that they have financial burden on them, teachers are coming up with stricter guidelines and by giving them lengthy custom coursework, they make matters worse for them.