Working on our emotional literacy gives us opportunities to develop our ability to understand and express different emotions. When we improve our emotional literacy, we can work towards recognising our own feelings and our ability to manage them. This allows us to cope with different life situations, such as managing conflict, making friends, coping in difficult situations, and being resilient when dealing with change.

Students have the opportunity to learn about:

• Character Strengths
• How emotions influence our behaviour
• Positive self-talk
• How emotions influence our friendships

As a family there are activities you can also do to develop emotional literacy at home.

Whole Family Activity:

Feelings Charades

• Gather together as a family, this might be around the dinner table, lounge room, or around the fire outside.
• Take turns to act out a feeling or emotion. Use your face and body language to act this out, For example, make an angry face and stamp your feet or
• Other family members need to guess the feeling/emotion.
• After someone has guessed the feeling/emotion, have family members discuss a time they have felt this way before and why. If it was a negative emotion, how did they overcome it?

Family Habit Builder:

Around the dinner table, ask everyone to share a feeling they felt during that day. Discuss how they dealt with that feeling and then discuss and share strategies you could use when faced with particular feelings. The more we work together to strengthen our children’s emotional literacy the more resilient they will become.

Andrea White
Wellbeing Teacher