1) Discuss emotions with the class. What emotions are there?
2) Ask the class what these emotions feel like? Do they feel nice or horrible? What is their favourite emotion?
3) Ask the class to choose one emotion and draw or paint what they think that emotion looks like. Get them to think about what kind of colour that emotion might be.
4) When the children have made their pictures, compare those pictures which portray the same emotion. Do the children’s pictures have similarities?
5) Discuss the kinds of colours we associate with emotion (red = anger, green = jealousy, white = peace etc.). Do any of these colours appear in the children’s pictures?
Here’s a related suggestion from a visitor…
I have tried a similar starter activity with Year 3. Grouped in threes, I gave them an A5 sheet of paper and asked them to draw different emotions. After a couple of goes, I asked them to move on to the next table and continue the activity. When they eventually arrived back at their starting positions, I gave them all a few minutes to look at and share with the class what was on their paper. I encouraged them to look at the different ways their classmates had sketched the different emotions and to look closely at the different sizes. We then discussed colours that were associated with different emotions.
This activity encourages the children to share ownership of their work and points out how different people express themselves, e.g. Some are more flamboyant with their work (using large areas of the paper), and some are more reserved (expressing themselves in smaller designs/areas). This activity can also be used when asking them to sketch words such as wave (hand or squiggle), jumping, straight, spiral etc.. and encourages them to really think about how they can represent each word. Enjoy!