This document provides activities to promote positive mental health in children by helping them understand and express emotions. It suggests creating a poster listing feelings, spending a week focusing on each of the core feelings of joy, sadness, anger, fear and anxiety, and having children identify situations that trigger each feeling and how they experience it physically. Additional activities include discussing who children can rely on for support, illustrating their support system, and writing poems describing different emotions using senses. The goal is for children to acknowledge, identify and express a range of feelings in a healthy manner.

1. Erasmus plus HAPPENS
Promoting positive mental health in children
Subject: SPHE(Social, Personal and Health Education)
Class: These activities can be adapted for any age group
Objectives: The child should be enabled to…
 name and identify a wide range of feelings and talk about and
explore their experience of these feelings
 recognise the ways in which each feeling presents itself in
their body/thoughts
 realise and explore the various ways feelings can be
expressed and dealt with
 develop confidence in their ability to express feelings in a
healthy manner
 explore feelings through drama, poetry and drawings
Identifying
feelings
- How many feelings can you name?
- With the help of the children, create a poster with a list of
feelings we experience
(for younger classes you could limit this to the main emotions(joy,
sadness, anger, fear, anxiety) In older classes encourage the
children to name as many of the various degrees of these feelings
as they can e.g. ANGER – rage, annoyed, irritated, furious etc.)
- It is beneficial to spend a week on each of the core feelings.
This gives the children time to focus on acknowledging,
identifying and expressing emotions.
- The accompanying worksheet can be filled in gradually
throughout the week as the children are focusing on each
area.
- The first section of the worksheet requires the children to
complete the sentence: I feel __________ when…
They may write or draw about situations that triggered this
particular feeling.
-
How do you
experience this
feeling?
- Ask the children to recall a time when they experienced
joy/sadness/anger/fear/anxiety.
Close your eyes and imagine you are in that moment. What
are you feeling? Where in your body can you feel it? What
colour would you associate with that feeling?
- It is important to highlight the fact that there is no wrong
answer as everyone experiences feelings in different ways.

2. Additional activities My Support System
- Discuss the importance of having people that you can spend
time with and rely on. We sometimes need people to help us
solve problems. Who could you rely on if you needed help?
- The children fill in the worksheet by writing the names of the
people they are closest to(immediate family members, close
friends) in the most inner circle.
- Gradually they fill in the outer circles with other important
people in their lives. Inner circle = people you can trust/rely
on the most.
- This is an important activity for the children to realise that
they have people who can help and guide them in times of
need.
Emotion poems
- The children create poems based on each of the emotions.
They use their senses to describe each feeling.
e.g. Joy is blue like a summer’s sky
It tastes like sweet candy floss
It smells like…