Emotion Explorations: Excited

First Grade Artist

What does "excited" mean to you?  This is the first emotion we investigated during Mind Move Make class in the Monsters and Emotions unit!  First, I had the students guess what emotion we would explore by reading the "excited" part in On Monday When It Rained, an excellent book by Cherryl Kachenmeister that identifies different emotions from a child's point of view.  No one guessed the emotion "excited" but every student enthusiastically voiced ideas about what the emotion might be!  Then, I asked each student to make an "excited" face for one another, which was fun to watch.  After that I read the "excited" part of the book The Way I Feel  by Janan Cain and asked them to think about a time when they felt excited themselves.    

After that it was time to move!  The students selected their yoga mats and we were ready to go.  We practiced Child's Pose, Downward Facing Dog, and Downward Facing Frog together.  Then we tried to feel every vertebra in the spine as we went from a forward fold to a standing position in "rag doll" style.  The students matched breath and movement while cycling through several Sun Salutations.  Then I asked them to invent a yoga pose that felt "excited" while staying in the defined space of their own yoga mats.  I loved watching the joyful movements they came up with while exploring "excited" with the whole body.

This session is titled Monsters and Emotions because the students are working on designing a monster for each emotion we investigate.  Last week I gave each child a sketch book, and by the end of Session One, everyone will have a collection of monsters to represent several human feelings.  Sometimes we will go beyond the sketch book and create more involved artworks.  These creative investigations of emotion will give the students the opportunity to visually describe what each feeling means to them.

To get the students in a monster kind of mood, we read Romping Monsters, Stomping Monsters, an energetic, fun-loving book by Jane Yolen. From the book and from many other visual resources the students received inspiration for designing their own "excited" monster. Before they started, we discussed the colors and facial expressions an "excited" monster might have. Everyone had a different idea about this, as everyone experiences emotion differently. It was wonderful to watch the artists at work!