Emotion Works Parent Information
Emotion Works is a colourful education programme designed to help children learn emotional language, develop emotional understanding and manage feelings and emotional behaviours. This programme is currently being used throughout Bankier Primary, from Primary 1 to Primary 7, to ensure our children are happy, settled and confident and ready to learn.
About Emotion Works
Emotion Works is based on the ‘Cog Model’. It breaks the topic of emotions down into 7 parts, but also shows how each part links together to help children and young people understand their emotions and how to express and manage them in a healthy way.
Early Level (Primary 1)
With our youngest children we focus on the orange cog: building and developing emotional language. We encourage children to think about other emotion words; moving on from just ‘happy’ or ‘sad’.
First Level (Primary 2 to Primary 4)
Our next step is to explore the yellow cog; looking at various triggers/causes for different emotions. We use stories, films, music, art and daily situations to discuss these.
First Level (Primary 2 to Primary 4)
The red cog encourages us to think about how the emotion makes us feel inside i.e. butterflies in our tummy, feeling hot, shaky or sweaty etc.
First Level (Primary 2 to Primary 4)
The green cog is the behaviour cog. This looks at what we do to show how we are feeling. What actions, facial expressions and movements do we use? Is this behaviour okay, and if not what could we do instead? This cog is important as we need to ensure our children are expressing their emotions in healthy and safe ways.
First Level (Primary 2 to Primary 4)
The blue cog is our regulation strategy. Here we explore what strategies we could use to cheer up or calm down if the emotion we are experiencing is a negative one. Different children will have different strategies. This may take some time to find what works for our children.
Further information
Please view the slides below for a more detailed look at Emotion Works: