Feelings Charades

Identifying what feelings look like for ourselves and for others helps us to learn about emotions and communicate better with one another. While we can always ask someone how they are feeling, we can also do our best to imagine how someone might be feeling by looking closely at their body movement and behavior. When we imagine how someone might be feeling, we are practicing empathy.

1. The teacher invites the students to sit or stand in a circle and choose the participant who will be the first to start the interaction.
2. Explain that you will ask for a volunteer to act out an emotion without speaking. Explain that they can use their face, hands, shoulders, or other parts of their body to communicate how they feel. Model what this might look like for a few different emotions.
3. Students take turns choosing an Emotions card and acting out the facial expressions and gestures without showing the card to to other participants. If online, the teacher can send the name of the emotion to each participant in personal messages.
4. Have the other students call out what emotion they think the person is acting out. Whoever guesses the correct emotion gets to act out the next Feelings Card.

• Do you ever need to practice empathy and identify another person’s feelings in real life? When?
• Are there feelings that are harder to read or recognize than others? Which ones?
• What is a good way to find out how someone is feeling, if you can’t read their expression?
• How would you play this game the next time we play?

For primary school students:

• Use simple emotions (e.g., happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, worried). Focus on one feeling and facilitate discussion throughout gameplay about how to identify the feeling in real life.
• Try Feelings Charades alongside music. Students should dance or move around when the music starts. When the music stops, they should freeze in a pose that shows “happy” (or other emotion for that round). Give students a new feeling and a moment to reflect on how they will express it before each round.
• Individually or in small groups, students create drawings or other art that show different feelings. The class guesses which feelings words were drawn.
• Facilitate a short version of Feelings Charades to re-energize students or switch between topics. Pick 1 or 2 Feelings Face cards, and have students guess the emotional word.

For primary school students:

• Discuss the consequences of (incorrectly) guessing or making assumptions about another person’s feelings - in the game versus in real life.
• Use more complex emotions (e.g., jealousy, guilt, love, etc.), or require them to use an expanded emotion vocabulary that includes intensity (e.g., angry, furious, etc.).