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Health and Wellbeing

Creatively Expressing and Releasing Emotions

Help children let big feelings out through drawing, movement, sound and play, even when they can't find the words.

  • 30 minutes
  • 8 modules
  • 0.5 CPD hours
  • Certificate

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What you'll learn

  • Steady your own reaction before helping a child with a big feeling
  • Make a feelings scale with a child using numbers, colours or weather
  • Use drama games to help children notice where emotions sit in the body
  • Use a teddy or an imaginary creature to give a child distance from a feeling
  • Set up mark-making, music and clay play with no end product

About this course

Asking a child "what's wrong?" in the middle of a meltdown rarely gets an answer. Finding words for a big feeling is hard at the best of times, and the questions can make it worse.

These tools give children another way to let it out. Make a feelings scale together, using numbers, colours or weather that runs from still water to storm. Play the potato game to feel how anger or sadness shows up in the body. Put a worry onto a teddy and let the child suggest how to help it. Scribble to music on a roll of cheap wallpaper, with no finished picture expected.

You don't need to be arty. The presenter, a practitioner who specialises in laughter and play, keeps it to paper, crayons and a willingness to be a bit silly. It works at home as well as in class.

  • For early career teachers, middle leaders and 4 other roles. Early years, primary and secondary.

8 modules

Open in order

  1. Introduction

    5 min

  2. Get comfortable with emotions

    5 min

  3. Create a scale

    4 min

  4. Recognise the feeling

    6 min

  5. Use the imagination

    3 min

  6. Create without an outcome

    5 min

  7. Improvise

    3 min

  8. Wrap up

    3 min