Gingerbread Man Feelings

THE GINGERBREAD MAN:  FEELINGS ACTIVITY 

I saw a Youtube video that had something similar to this, but we adapted it to discuss how Matthew's big "mad" feeling covers up the true feelings he may be having and how its had to determine what the true feelings are when we let the big feelings take over.

1. I started by taking a piece of brown construction paper and drawing two gingerbread man shapes on it for Matthew to cut out.

2.  Once we had the gingerbread man cut out, I asked Matthew to tell me some feelings.  He told me happy, sad, and mad.  Later on in the activity he also brought up worried.  He seems to be able to identify feelings when asked but still has a difficult time identifying anything other than mad in real life situations.

3.  I told him I wanted to start with sad and asked him what color he thought sad was, he picked blue.  I asked him where in his body he felt it when he was sad.  He immediately said his legs.  I asked him what happened to his legs when he felt sad and he told me they felt tired.  WOW!!  I never even thought about that but so true!  I told him I felt sad in my heart, so we drew sad on our gingerbread man.

 4.  We did the same thing with happy and scared.  You could add other emotions in but we are still working on the basics!

 5.  When we got to mad I told him that when I feel mad it makes my whole body mad.  I had him show me what it looks lie to be mad (he is a pro at this :) ).  We talked about how often times that mad feeling covers up the real feeling we are having underneath and it is so hard to figure out the real feeling if we let the mad cover it up.  Then we drew mad covering everything up.

 6.  We talked about things we can do when we feel mad, such as breathing, taking time in our room, reading a book, doing a puzzle, etc.

 7.  Then we turned the gingerbread over and decorated the other sides however we wanted to and hung them on the tree!

I also love Christine Moers video on Feelings for our kiddos!