Painting my feelings

Exploring emotions through art

What you need:

● A book about emotions, such as It’s OK to Cry by

Molly Potter or The Colour

Monster by Anna Llenas ● Paints (blue, red, purple, yellow, brown and grey) ● Paint brushes

● Paper ● Aprons ● Easels or space for the children to make paintings

Top tip

There are some great books to help explore this topic, for example, Tom Percival’s emotionally resonant Big Bright Feelings series.

Health & Safety

Be mindful that a child may disclose something needing further investigation. Practitioners need to have a good understanding of the setting’s safeguarding procedures.

What to do:

1. Sit the children comfortably in a small group. 2. Introduce the topic of feelings by talking about the language of emotions and feelings, such as happy, sad, angry, scared, tired and bored. 3. Ask the children what makes them feel these emotions whilst reinforcing the vocabulary. 4. Read the children a story about emotions. 5. Suggest to the children that they might like to paint how they feel using the following colours: ● Sad = blue ● Angry = red ● Happy/joyful = yellow ● Tired = brown ● Scared/anxious = purple ● Bored = grey

What’s in it for the children?

Children are in a safe and secure space to explore their emotions through colours, painting and speech.

Taking it forward

● Encourage the children to share their paintings with the group, talking about the emotions that they have painted. ● Introduce puppets so that the children can create a dramatic enactment of their paintings. ● Display the children’s work or create an emotions display board for parents and carers. ● Work with the children to think of other emotions and choose colours to represent these feelings.