Lesson Idea | Coloring Our Emotions

Discipline: This activity can be applied in any class or subject area.
Age level: All (with some adaptations for younger students)
Materials: paint chips from the hardware store
Time: 15-30 minutes (or longer if you build out some of the activities)

Recognizing, talking about, and respecting our own and others’ feelings is vital to building mutual respect in the classroom. But our emotions are intangible and very personal things so it can be hard to find the vocabulary to really discuss them. This series of activities offers students the chance to practice mapping their emotions onto something more concrete – color – and then using color to explore what emotion looks like on a spectrum.

What to do:
Provide students with a wide array of paint chips that show colors on a spectrum. Have them pick a color that best represents how they are feeling right now. You can spread these paint chips out in an open space in your classroom, tack them to a bulletin board, put them in the middle of a carpet, etc.

Invite students to stand in a circle and share their name, the color they chose, and a gesture that expresses the emotion they associate with that color. The rest of the group repeats the name, color, and gesture three times.

Have students walk around the room (or better yet outside!) and look for all the places where they see this color, in its various hues (you may need to talk about what hues are).

Bring the group back together and have them think about how the emotion they attached to that color also exists in them at many different levels of intensity. Looking at their paint chip, have them write something in each box that describes what is happening when their emotion is at that level of intensity. For example, if the emotion they chose was happy, at its most intense they might write “When it’s my birthday and I get the thing I wanted most.” In the middle, it might be, “When I’m running around at recess with my friends.” And then at its least intense, it might be, “When the temperature of my oatmeal is just right.” Have students partner up and discuss what they wrote.

Debrief as a class:
What did you notice?
What is it like to think about your emotions in this way?
How might you use something like this with your students?

Understanding emotions is key to learning how we navigate relationships with each other. Giving students multiple opportunities to think about how they feel, articulate it, and share their thinking with you and their peers builds trust, self-awareness, and community. You could use pieces of this full activity as a warm-up in class, as a writing exercise, as an art project, and more. But at its core, it’s about doing some self-reflection which is really important to healthy social and emotional development. Also, mutual respect is grounded in the belief that all feelings matter, that I see you as you are and welcome you with whatever feelings you bring into the learning environment and an activity like this also validates that.

Standards Addressed by These Activities

Common Core College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Language
Common Core College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing
Common Core College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Speaking and Listening
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning Competencies

For further information, please visit Everyday Speech website.