Make a symbolic weather chart and forecast your feelings!
What you’ll need: Paper and card, blu tac or sticky tape, coloured pens or pencils, scissors
What’s it for?
This activity will help you to explore how you are feeling and make a visual representation of your emotions that you can reflect on and share with others. Learning to recognise and name how you’re feeling is a core skill of emotional literacy.
Check In:
Notice how you’re feeling right now. Close your eyes and notice what’s going on inside your mind and body.
How are you feeling?
What are you thinking?
How does your body feel?
Method:
Make a list of the most important different feelings you experience regularly. Start with the ones that everyone often feels, like happy, sad, angry, worried, and excited. Feel free to add more to this.
Now think about different types of weather and how you might link these with the feelings you listed. For example, you might associate being happy with the sun and fluffy white clouds, sadness with rain, anger with storm clouds with lightning, excitement with snowflakes, and worry with strong winds.
Draw symbols for these on a piece of paper (sun, clouds, wind, snow, etc.) colour them in and cut them out. On the back write the feeling they represent (for example, write ‘anger’ on the back of your storm cloud with lightning). Make sure you make several of each.
On a big piece of paper draw a picture of the outline of your country. Make sure this is big enough to stick on the symbols you’ve created.
Now the fun part! Think carefully about how you’re feeling right now. On your big country outline, stick the symbol which represents your feelings. You might want to fix them to the picture with blu tac so that you can reuse them and move them around. If you’re feeling totally happy, cover your map with your weather symbol for happy - for example, lots of bright suns covering the whole country. If you’re feeling quite happy, but are worried about something, place some bright suns with some that reflect worry - perhaps a symbol for wind.
When you’ve finished you could show this to someone to let them know how you’re feeling today. If you’re feeling angry or worried about something, why not talk to someone you trust about the situation?
You can change your chart every day, or whenever your mood changes! Why not stick your Weather Forecast Feeling chart on your bedroom door and then anyone that walks by will know how you’re feeling that day!
Extra Activity: You could ask a friend or family member if they would like to make their own feeling forecast with your chart. Discuss how different or similar your feelings are on that day.
When you’ve finished, spend a moment reflecting on the activity and ask yourself the following questions:
Did you learn anything new about yourself while you did this activity?
If you showed your Weather Forecast Feeling Chart to someone, how did they react?
Did thinking about and placing your feelings on the chart help you to pin-point exactly what you were feeling?
When it rains in real life, you take an umbrella with you to stop yourself getting wet. What could you do to prevent yourself from getting emotionally wet? If it’s very sunny, you wear sun cream to protect yourself. What could you do to prevent yourself from emotionally getting sunburnt?
Conclusion:
This activity helps you to name and explore your feelings and how these all fit together - sometimes in complex ways. You might feel mostly happy, for example, but you’re also a bit angry that you couldn’t go to the park when you wanted: on your chart, you might represent this with mostly sun across the country, but with a few angry storm clouds in one region. This is a good way to practise your emotional literacy.
Take a moment to notice how you are feeling at the end of this activity. Did you discover anything surprising? What can you take away to make you feel better about yourself from this activity?
If you would like to, share something about your experience with this activity with someone you live with! Ask the person who looks after you to send us an email if you have any questions or comments about the activity, or would like to send us any pictures (info@catcorner.co.uk). Don't forget to subscribe for more fun CAT activities!
Created by Ian Grundy © May 2020
Creative Arts Used: Art
Psychological Areas Explored: Emotional Wellbeing, Self-Exploration
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These activities could be done by children of all ages, but some may need the support of their parent or carer to read the instructions or complete the activity safely.
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