Especially for Teachers

Bright Ideas Lesson Plans

The Feeling Town

Summary of activity: This activity helps students associate words with feelings and provides an opportunity for students to participate in a hands on pre-writing activity.

Materials needed: Newspapers, scissors, glue, pencils, crayons, markers, construction paper.

Begin the activity by introducing students to emotions and feeling words by playing "I Spy a Feeling". Make exaggerated faces showing that you are happy, sad, angry, surprised, frightened, etc. Ask students to identify how you are feeling and to imitate your expressions. Let volunteers act out "feelings" and then call on classmates to guess their feeling. Then encourage appropriate verbal expressions of emotions by asking to complete these sentences during a small group setting: 1. I was happy today when...; 2. I was scared today when...; 3. I was excited today when...

After this brief introduction to emotions and feeling words, complete the following hands-on activity.

Using construction paper, students drew their own home or apartment.

Each student, or small group of students, then choose a situation that occurred during their school day. Using the newspaper, students then found and cut out pictures and words that told about feelings and emotions during this situation. These pictures and words were then glued onto their house depicting the feelings of the student as well as family members when the student arrived home and shared the emotional event with their family.

For example, one student was chosen to lead the Pledge of Allegiance on our monthly school news broadcast and featured his feeling of excitement and what he thought the reaction of his family members would be when he arrived home. He collected pictures from the newspaper that showed his sister, mother, and father and pasted these pictures into the windows. He placed a picture of a young boy that represented himself entering the front door. Speech bubbles were then drawn for each character and newspaper words were glued in the bubbles depicting each family members reaction to his news.

This pre-writing activity was then used to create a first draft story about emotions and feelings during a personal experience. During this activity students were highly motivated by the hands on activity. They worked together to find just the right picture or word for each student´s house.

Students especially enjoyed displaying this "Feeling Town" of our class houses and the stories that developed from this highly motivating pre-writing activity. At my students request, this activity will be repeated during a future writing lesson.

Judith P. Degler
Spruce Creek Elementary

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