Feelings Ruler

All of our emotions have different sizes or strengths. Today we will use a tool to help us share how we are feeling with others. Talking about our feelings helps us to learn about emotions and communicate with one another. This helps us to better understand ourselves and build stronger relationships with each other.

1. Create a ruler poster or visual that helps students measure the strength of their feelings (to say how strong or how ‘big’ their emotions are).
2. Explain this tool to students and have them plot feelings words on the ruler to help build their emotional vocabulary (e.g., furious vs. angry, happy vs. ecstatic, etc.).
3. Display this poster or visual somewhere visible in the classroom or screenshare the poster. Remind students to reference this when expressing their feelings at school.
4. Use this with individual students throughout the day (e.g., have a student who is feeling frustrated try to identify where they are on the Feelings Ruler while they wait for help from you).

• Do you think one emotion always has the same position on the Feeling s Ruler? Do we always feel a certain emotion with the same intensity? Why?
• Would two different people put the same emotion at the same spot on the Feelings Ruler?
• How did you feel before you used the Feelings Ruler to express how you were feeling? What about after? Did you notice a change?
• How does expressing our emotions help us in our lives (at home or at school)?

For primary school students:

• Combine Feelings Rules with another Kernel which builds students’s emotional vocabulary or develops their ability to recognize and express emotions to encourage them to use the ruler to determine the intensity of their emotions.
• Talk about feelings simply in terms of how “big” or “small” they feel. Ask students how they would feel in a range of scenarios - e.g., if they were eating their favorite food, having a hard time with schoolwork, etc. Create multiple Feelings Rulers for varying intensities of feelings. Have students discuss how they can identify how intense a feeling is (e.g., what does this emotion feel like in your body at different spots on the ruler?).

For students in grades 5-6:

• For older students, turn this into a Feelings Plot - a four-quadrant plot that differentiates pleasant and unpleasant emotions, with left to right indicating intensity and up and down indicating pleasant or unpleasant. To do this, divide the sheet into 4 equal parts,depicting 2 axes. The horizontal line will show ow intense a particular emotion is, and the vertical line will show how pleasant or unpleasant it is for them. Dive deeper into discussions about the physical and psychological cues that help us take a “measurement” on our feelings and emotions.