02/06/2023
One of my favorite projects to do with groups of children is to learn how to use line, shape, and color to show different emotions. This is a long process over several weeks involving movements, sounds, and finally putting pencil (or oil pastel) to paper.
An important component of this work is seeing how different people express their emotions differently. Before making art, we did a little exercise: I created emotion dice and gave each child a set of different colored cards. I'd roll the dice, and when an emotion came up they had to hold up which color they think of when they hear that emotion. It was interesting to see even in this brief exercise that there is a pretty wide range of responses! Depending on the emotion and comfort level of the group, we might have a short conversation about why each person chose their color.
Finally, we used the emotion dice paired with the shape dice to create small illustrations. "Mad Triangle," "Worried Square," "Sad Triangle," and "Excited Circle."
After each week's lesson, the children made an illustration in their journals that represented how they felt that day using only abstract line, shape, and color. My goal is for these journals to be quick non-verbal check-ins as we move deeper into our process.
