Make your own emotion stones

What you need

• A few stones Some markers or paint

Benefits

This learning experience will promote emotion recognition, helping your child to notice how facial features can tell us how someone is feeling.You can encourage your child to discuss how they are feeling or when they have felt like this emotion to encourage expanding their language and gain knowledge about their own and other people’s feelings.

The experience

Prepare for a little trip to your local park. While on the trip, you can collect some stones with your child. Once you get home, you could draw facial features on each stone. Set them out and let your child explore making faces. You could discuss the facial features with your child by asking where the nose is for example.

During this activity, you could discuss the different feelings the painted faces are displaying. Why not talk about the times when they have felt like this, or even let them tell you when they had a similar feeling?

Showing actions as well as looking at facial features will help your child understand and recognise emotions in their everyday life.