Understanding your own emotions and recognizing the emotions of people around you is a crucial skill that helps one to speak freely about feelings. Being open to feelings and discussions may help to avoid some psychological issues in the future life. Moreover, knowing your emotions is the key to understanding how to deal with them. Feeling activities will teach your child to be open to the theme of emotions and cope with them in a good and positive way.

There are 10 activities to play with a child that helps develop emotional intelligence.

Storytime

Storytime is one of the most well-known ways to develop a child’s emotional intelligence. Moreover, it’s a nice ritual that will make going to bed much easier. Through the stories, a kid gets to know a character’s life situations and emotional responses to them; thus, a child is learning crucial life lessons for themselves. While reading, do not forget to communicate with your child by asking questions about the character’s feelings and the reasons for them; moreover, ask your kid what they would feel in the same situation.

Mirror emotions

The only thing you’ll need for this game is a mirror. The key task of this activity is to make a child observe their own emotions. This activity will teach a kid to define different emotions on people’s faces. Start by showing simple emotions like happiness or anger. Ask your child to observe which traits are changing as the mood changes from one to the other. Then try to portray such emotions as excitement, excitement, or boredom.

Feeling faces

To do the ‘feeling faces’ activity, you will need a magazine, stickers, or cards representing people or animals’ emotions. Offer your child to look at different faces and guess the emotions they’re having. Cut out different faces and then group them according to their emotions, for example, a group of happy faces. You may also challenge the kid by asking why those faces feel these exact emotions.

Dance with your feelings

The activity ‘dance with your feelings’ also involves the development of physical coordination and imagination. A child should think about how to express emotions through dance. Offer your kid to reflect on some feelings through movements. Use different music suitable for different moods as well. For example, try doing an angry, tired, or excited dance. Moreover, you may also turn on different music for your child to guess the suitable mood and emotions.

Emotion songs

There are a variety of different songs on YouTube devoted to emotions. Music is a great tool to explain feelings. Talk with your child about these songs and the emotions they represent.

Emotion drawing

As we all know, all types of arts involve thoughts and feelings’ reflection. That is why ‘emotion drawing’ is a good way to communicate with your child and help them find a way to express all emotions they’re feeling right now. So, offer your kid to draw their feelings and discuss the drawing afterward.

Anxiety thermometer

An anxiety thermometer is a great idea to help your child identify their true emotions. You only need to draw a thermometer with a scale of anxiety levels. It is essential to define each value so that it is easier for the child to navigate and choose the appropriate option. The activity may be supplemented with the child’s story explanations about the selected figure. However, if the child does not want to share right now, do not put pressure on them; try to switch attention.

How would you feel

‘How would you feel is a verbal game aimed at developing the ability of a child to present their feelings orally. Moreover, this activity helps to better understand some hypothetical situations and their influence on a kid’s emotions. Thus, this game also develops cognitive skills, namely, critical thinking and deductive reasoning.

Here are some of the questions you might ask during the game:

• How did you feel when…?
• How would you feel if…?
• How does it make you feel when…?

Relax like a cat

This a fun exercise to help reduce your child’s stress levels. To perform this activity, the child should lie down as cats do, they can use different positions, imagining themselves as a relaxed and contented cat. Also, the tactile sensation can be turned on; you can stroke the child and say nice things to them, but do not leave the role-play, remember it’s a cat you’re communicating with.

Paper plate face

During this game, a kid will acquire the ability to create a physical representation of emotions by drawing faces. It’s fun and involves creative thinking skills! As it is clear from the name of the activity, to create a face, your kid will need a paper plate and any material for drawing; it may be anything: crayons, pencils, markers, and so on. Then draw any emotion and try to guess each other’s faces and emotions. Moreover, you may turn your plate faces into masks and make a fun play.