About this activity
Fourteen emotion words for a communication system: happy, sad, mad, scared, tired, excited, hurt, surprised, frustrated, proud, sick, bored, nervous, calm. Most core boards carry happy, sad and mad and stop there, which leaves a student able to report three states out of the dozens they experience — and frustrated in particular is the one whose absence gets expressed as behaviour.
How to use it in a session
Model the words when you are feeling them, not when the student is. Saying I'm frustrated while something goes wrong is the clearest teaching there is, and it removes the pressure of asking a child to label their own state in a difficult moment. Frustrated, nervous and bored deserve the most modelling because they are the least often taught and the most often needed. Eight minutes on the board and then a session of modelling.
What to listen for
Watch for the word arriving before the behaviour. A student who hits frustrated instead of pushing a task away has made an enormous gain, and it is worth recording as such even though nothing about it looks like language progress. Notice whether the vocabulary is used about others — he's sad — which is a later and harder use than self-report.
Carrying it home
Families can name their own feelings out loud, which is the model that costs nothing. I'm tired, I'm proud of you, that was frustrating — heard often enough, the words become available.
Questions
- What ages is this for?
- Kindergarten through fifth grade, and any AAC user whose emotion vocabulary is limited to the basic three.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all fourteen cards play with no login.
- Which word should I add first?
- Frustrated, usually. It is the state that most often gets expressed through behaviour when there is no word for it, and having the word available changes what happens in those moments.