The It’s OK to Cry Activity Pack by Sarah Jennings and Molly Potter, provided by Bloomsbury Education, is a thoughtful and interactive resource designed to help children explore, understand, and manage challenging emotions. Through various reflective activities, this pack empowers children to recognise their feelings and practice empathy, emotional awareness, and positive coping strategies.
Key Features:
Understanding Uncomfortable Feelings: This section invites children to reflect on common emotions such as annoyance, disappointment, worry, sadness, and fear. By recalling times they felt these emotions, children can better understand and articulate their feelings.
Emotion and Scenario Matching: Activities such as How Would You Feel? prompt children to connect specific situations to potential emotions, such as feeling nervous before a football match or excited the night before a birthday. This exercise enhances emotional vocabulary and empathy by linking real-life scenarios with corresponding feelings.
Helping Friends: This activity encourages children to think about comforting actions, like giving a hug or talking things through, fostering kindness and compassion in peer interactions.
Furious Scribbles: The Frowning Page provides a safe outlet for children to express anger through drawing, helping them release tension. They are also invited to imagine and draw situations that would make them feel angry, disgusted, or irritable.
Sensory Emotion Connections: What Feeling Do These Make You Think Of? uses imagery, like a volcano for anger or fireworks for excitement, to encourage children to associate visuals with emotions. This activity builds sensory awareness and emotional connections.
Emotion Descriptions and Scenarios: Which Feeling is Being Described? introduces various emotions such as disgust, amusement, distress, and love, helping children understand how these emotions manifest physically and socially.
Helpful vs. Unhelpful Reactions: Children are prompted to consider the effectiveness of different responses to uncomfortable feelings, like talking to an adult, taking deep breaths, or going for a walk. This teaches emotional regulation and constructive coping techniques.
Empathetic Statements: What Would You Rather Hear? presents pairs of comforting and dismissive phrases, encouraging children to choose compassionate responses over unhelpful ones, fostering an understanding of supportive communication.
Creative Expression of Happiness: The Smiling Page invites children to draw things that make them happy, imagine the taste of excitement, and create a stick figure demonstrating enthusiasm, providing an enjoyable and positive outlet for expressing joy.
Linking Thoughts and Feelings: Thoughts and Feelings explores how thoughts influence emotions, with prompts to match statements like “He is always nasty to me” with feelings like anger, helping children identify and reflect on the impact of negative thinking patterns.
The Power of Crying: A Good Cry addresses the benefits of crying as an emotional release, normalising tears as a healthy response to sadness, pain, or frustration.
This It’s OK to Cry Activity Pack is a comprehensive resource for classrooms, therapy sessions, or home use, providing children with a safe space to explore emotions and learn constructive ways to express themselves. Through engaging, hands-on activities, it fosters self-awareness, empathy, and resilience, supporting the emotional development of young learners.
