Is Your Toddler Experiencing Big Emotions? Help Them Express Feelings Through Fun Reading Activities
Mom, are you looking for a way to help your toddler communicate better about their feelings? Helping toddlers communicate their feelings can be challenging yet rewarding. When my daughter started experiencing BIG Feelings, I turned to engaging reading activities to help her express herself better.
In order to help my toddler I created a lesson plan called the “Big Feelings'' . In this post, I'll share how these activities, centered around the book 'Today I Feel Silly: And Other Moods That Make My Day' by Jamie Lee Curtis, can benefit your toddler too.
Why Helping Your Toddler with Emotions Now will Benefit them Later
These young minds encounter a wide range of feelings. They often express these feelings vividly through different facial expressions and sometimes with sounds.
By engaging in emotional activities at a young age, you are helping your toddlers learn to express their feelings more clearly. This will lay the groundwork for managing intense emotions as young adults in the future. It provides them with great tools and enhances their problem-solving skills.
Which is crucial in developing their social-emotional skills.
Want to learn more about social emotional learning?
I cover more in detail with this blog post >>What is Social Emotional Learning<< and why these skills are important for their growth and development.
Top Book Recommendation To Navigate Big Feelings
For the lesson plan, I chose "Today I Feel Silly: And Other Moods That Make My Day" by Jamie Lee Curtis. This storybook is one I could use to discuss emotions with my toddlers and older nieces and nephews.
It provides a solid foundational tool for teaching basic feeling and also advanced social-emotional learning. The vivid illustrations allow you to ask open ended questions about what is happening on the pages as you read to your toddler.
Few items were not age appropriate for my household and adjusted the words when I was reading aloud to my little one. However, when I read the book to my older niece I was able to ask her questions about those specific situations.
While reading this book, your toddlers will observe a comprehensive introduction to different feelings, including joy, happy, upset, angry faces, and more. These facial features and body language they see in characters, will help them to start to recognize and relate to their feelings.
Naturally curious toddlers will find the different scenarios and characters relatable. This can guide you to prompt discussions about what your toddler might be experiencing and emotions that are connected to that specific experience.
What I like the most about this book is particularly effective because it doesn't just focus on positive emotions. By including scenarios where characters feel sad, angry, or confused, it offers a more realistic view of emotional experiences.
This approach helps toddlers understand that feeling a range of emotions is normal. It also teaches them that each emotion has its place and value.
Peek Inside the Lesson Plan
Enhancing Emotional Learning Through Activities
Interactive Reading as a Gateway to Emotional Understanding
Incorporating interactive reading into our daily routines offers a powerful tool for emotional development. This book not only entertains but serves as a fundamental resource in teaching toddlers to recognize and articulate a wide range of emotions.
Boost Emotional Intelligence with These Engaging Activities
5 Ways to Engaging Toddlers During Interactive Reading
To maximize the benefits of interactive reading and truly connect our toddlers with their emotions, consider the following strategies:
Pause to Discuss: As you read, take moments to pause and ask your toddler how they think a character is feeling.
For instance, "Look at how “character” is standing or looking. How do you think s/he feels?" This encourages toddlers to think critically about the emotions being displayed and to verbalize their thoughts.
Relate to Personal Experiences: Make connections between the emotions in the book and real-life situations your toddler may have experienced.
You could say, "Remember when you felt really excited at the park? That’s like how “character” feels in the story when s/he at the birthday party."
Encourage Expression: Invite your toddler to mimic the facial expressions and body language of the characters. This not only makes reading fun but also helps them physically experience and recognize different emotions.
Use Props: Enhance Learning with Props and Visuals for Emotional Understanding.
For example, if a character is happy, a simple smiley face on a stick can help your toddler visualize and embody happiness. Props make abstract emotions tangible, which is especially helpful for young learners.
Ask Engaging Questions and Plan Follow-Up Activities: After reading, ask open-ended questions.
"What do you think “character” will do next time she feels that way?"
These questions encourage toddlers to apply emotional concepts to future scenarios, enhancing their predictive and empathetic skills.
Top 3 Benefits of Interactive Reading
Interactive reading helps build a bridge between understanding emotions in books and applying them in real life.
By actively involving toddlers in the reading process:
We help them develop critical thinking about emotions.
Improve their vocabulary for expressing feelings.
Nurture a deeper emotional intelligence that will benefit them as they grow.
Through these thoughtful engagements, books become more than stories they become lessons in understanding and managing feelings. They help lay a foundation for emotional resilience and empathy that will support toddlers throughout their development.
Fun Activities to Help Toddlers Understand and Express Emotions
Are you ready to take it beyond just reading and want to do something fun? Incorporate fun activities that promote the development of social-emotional skills. This helps understand different emotions. It also helps practice empathy and social interactions.
I cover my top 5 activities I like to incorporate when I’m teaching my little one about feeling here
>>5 Activities To Help Your Toddler Express Feelings and Emotions<<
Mom, there is no need to make your own because in the back of the book there is a facial expression wheel chart. With this chart your little one is able to create different variations of possible emotions combinations. My little one likes googly eyes, a.k .a. silly facial expressions.
3 Ways to Support Emotional Development at Home
Parenting young learners through their emotional development journey can be challenging and rewarding. In addition, to structure emotional activities, parents can support their child's social-emotional learning in many ways.
Create a safe and nurturing environment: Where children feel comfortable expressing their emotions.This includes acknowledging and validating their feelings, no matter how small they seem. It's also helpful to teach them words associated with emotions, aiding them in articulating their feelings more effectively.
Introduce great books: That discuss emotions is another excellent method. Books offer relatable stories for children. They also show different scenarios and reactions. These stories can be a springboard for discussions about feelings and appropriate responses.
Here are 5 books I use and can be found in this blog post.
>> 5 Activities To Help Your Toddler Express Feelings and Emotions <<
Engage in the creative process: This can be a great bonding experience that fosters emotional growth. Creating something together through art, music, or storytelling allows for a shared experience. Emotions can be explored and discussed in a relaxed and enjoyable setting.
Grab the Lesson Plan to Start the Journey of Exploring Emotions
In exploring the emotional world of toddlers, we've uncovered the vital role of structured activities, reading, and play in developing their emotional intelligence.
Remember, each emotion, whether a happy face or a sad one, is an opportunity for growth and learning. Let's continue this journey together.
