At home
Your tower fell over just as you finished it. Your face feels hot and you want to throw something.
What do you do?
Step 1: What Would You Do?
There is often more than one good answer. Pick one and see what happens.
At a party
There are lots of people and it is very loud. Your tummy feels funny and you want to go home.
What is that feeling?
Step 2: What That Was
The name for what you just worked out.
Happy. Sad. Cross. Scared. Excited. Those are names for feelings.
You feel them in your body
Cross can be hot in your face. Scared can be wobbly in your tummy. Your body tells you first.
All feelings are allowed
You are allowed to feel anything. What you do about it is the part you choose.
Step 3: Try It
These ones do have right answers.
Where Do You Feel It?
Tap a feeling, then tap where it usually goes.
Match each feeling to where people often feel it.
Tap a card on the left to start.
Step 4: Quick Check
Two questions, then you are done.
Question 1 of 1
Is it all right to feel cross?
Step 5: Your Life Mission
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Three feelings today
- Notice three times today when you feel something.
- Say the name of each one.
- Say where in your body you felt it.
Why: The words are the tools. Three a day builds the set fast.
For a grown-up: Say yours too — "I am feeling rushed and it is in my shoulders". Children learn this vocabulary almost entirely by hearing it used.
Step 6: What You Learned
- Feelings have names.
- You feel them in your body first.
- All feelings are allowed. What you do is your choice.
For the grown-up
Naming a feeling reliably reduces its intensity, which is why this lesson leads the chapter. A child with five words for feelings has five tools; a child with "good" and "bad" has almost none.
The most useful thing you can do is narrate rather than correct: "you look really cross" lands very differently from "do not be cross". The first gives them a word, the second tells them the feeling was a mistake.
Separating the feeling from the behavior is the whole game here. "You are allowed to be furious. You are not allowed to hit" is a sentence worth having ready, because it is much easier said in advance than mid-storm.