Feelings Wheel PDF and SEL Tools
Below we’ve included a printable feelings wheel and other SEL tools that you can use at home or in the classroom.
There’s no doubt that social emotional learning is more important than ever. For many young children, regardless of their academic aptitude or interest, emotional regulation and self-management can be a challenge. With dedicated integration, SEL can help your child inside and outside of the classroom Integrating SEL into instruction is an important part of any learner’s school day. The learning can also continue beyond the classroom.. Whether you, as teacher or parent, prefer to use a digital or printable feelings wheel, emotions charts, feelings thermometers, anger thermometers, or mood meters, knowing when and how to use these tools is paramount.
Feelings Wheel, Emotions Charts and Mood Meters (Printable PDFs)
An emotions chart, feelings chart, or mood meter is helpful to have on hand during the start of a day and throughout a day. These charts can be visual or employ the use of language in order to help your child express their emotions.
How should I use it?
Knowing how a child is feeling at the start of each day is important. You may ask your child to point to an emotion or share their emotion with you by plotting it on one of these charts. This tool offers two forms of feedback:
- immediate feedback to help you understand how the learner feels in that moment
- sustained feedback that can allow you to track a child’s mood over a series of days or weeks.
Keeping a more graphic, picture-based mood meter printed and within the child’s sightline can also be useful for moments when the child has difficulty naming and identifying their emotions, but can still point to what they may be feeling on the chart.
The use of mood meters and emotions charts is also beneficial in that it exposes the learner to a variety of vocabulary, thus bolstering the language they have to identify, with precision, how they feel. Remember that you should also model the use of the emotions/ feelings chart or mood meter. When you explain how you’re feeling, use the chart to do so.
This emotions wheel includes basic feelings and extends to more complex emotions, such as: confident, excluded, valued, embarrassed, shocked, and more.
Students will use the emotions thermometer, or mood meter, to indicate where they are feeling under each emotion.
This printable list of emotions includes basic feelings along with more complex emotions, such as: thankful, anxious, appreciated, disappointed, overwhelmed, and more.
This printable emotions chart lists basic feelings and complex emotions. This is a great social emotional learning tool for teachers and students!
Student can look through the list of emotions and try to identify how they are feeling. This printable feelings chart is a terrific social emotional learning resource for the classroom or at home!
Anger Thermometers
Anger thermometers are helpful tools that can help teachers and learners navigate more uncomfortable moments. Anger thermometers allow learners to identify the intensity of their anger and can help them visualize what their anger looks like on a scale.
How should I use it?
Anger thermometers help children (and adults) become more self-aware. They can reflect on how they express anger and make plans to cope, self-manage, and decompress. Like emotions/ feelings charts, and mood meters, anger thermometers offer opportunity for reflection and discussion.
The best time to begin discussing what anger looks like for a child (and how to cope) is before they become angry. By discussing this social emotional tool explicitly, the child can cultivate a stronger sense of self-awareness and understand how to self-regulate during moments of emotional intensity.
There is great power in infusing social emotional learning into your learning space because it can promote a safer, emotionally intelligent and productive learning environment, and arm both children and adults with the language necessary to respond to one another with empathy. Resource: https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/
Students will shade in the thermometer to measure how they are feeling. Then, they will answer a few questions about how they feel. You can use a feelings wheel in combination with this activity to help students name their "angry" feeling!