Subject: SEL (Social-Emotional Learning)

Lesson Length: 40 mins - 1 hour

Topic: Emotions

Grade Level: 4, 5

Standards / Framework:

Brief Description: Students will create a comic depicting a variety of emotions.

Know Before You Start: Students should be able to label emotions, body language and expressions.

Hook:

  • 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?

Activity:

  • 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.

       

Closure:

  • 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.

Differentiation:

  • 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.

Resources:

  • 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?