Create Emotion Characters

At a Glance:

Grades:	4, 5
Subject:	SEL (Social-Emotional Learning)
Topic:	Emotions
Lesson Length:	40 mins - 1 hour

Standards / Framework:

Students will create a comic depicting a variety of emotions.

Students should be able to label emotions, body language and expressions.

Have students stand up and use their bodies, facial expression, and voices to act out different emotions. What does excitement look like? Anger? Confusion?
Review how we know when someone is feeling a certain way.
- We read body language.
- We look at facial expressions.
- We listen to the voice tone and words they choose to express themselves.
Review how we know what we are feeling?
- We can feel what our bodies are physically experiencing.
- We can listen to the words and tone we are using to express ourselves. How do we speak when we are angry? Excited?

Read and discuss the sample comic.
Have students create an emotion comic. Each panel should include:
- a character expressing a specific emotion.
- a caption listing the emotion and dialogue.

Share and discuss student comics. Are there any similarities? Differences?
How do these differences relate to how each of us expresses our emotions?
Display and categorize comics by emotion. For example, all “frustrated” comics are displayed together.

Allow students to use the speech-to-text feature.
Preteach vocabulary.
Provide visuals of different emotions with labels.
Allow students to work with a peer model.
Provide sentence starters as needed.
As students create, discuss color as it relates to emotion.
- Does yellow make you think of happiness?
- Does blue make you feel low?
Allow students to use the voiceover feature to read their comics aloud.

Comic to print or display: Comic.
Showing a short clip of “Inside Out” from Disney’s Pixar and discussing how the artists showed each emotion through color, dialogue, and physical/body language?