• English

2. lesson on feelings (3 years and 5,6 years)

Minis group (3 years)

1. I placed pictures on the floor and gathered the children around. At first I let them just to observe and think, then we started to talk from what ever would come up first.  
Pictures showed: people thinking of food, hungry dogs,hungry cats, tired teacher in a classroom of kids, two smiling dolphins,tired dogs, happy horse, happy tree, sad dog, sad cat, frozen tree, tired elephant teacher …

2.    We discussed the pictures (what there was, how many things there were, what animals there were, how they looked like … we talked all the things that children proposed, they started counting on their own and tried to make them into groups - animals and people, one thing on the picture, more things on the picture) and final dividing into groups by the feeling the character on the picture was expressing.
(This lesson was better for the younger group than the previous one. In the previous  (1st lesson) they could not imagine one picture and make a link to a feeling. But when they had a picture of one with both features, they could think and they were interested.)
3.    We put the grouped pictures into boxes. We made a small game, using them. I put a box with ‘tired’ expressions nearthe beds, the ‘happy’ ones to the middle of the class, the ‘sad’ ones in the corner, the ‘hungry’ ones near the door to the kitchen.
4.  The children would move freely around the classroom singing a song ‘How are you?’ At one point I would say a sentence about how I feel (I’m hungry) with making a gesture and children would have to run to the right place very fast.
After several tries, I stopped doing gestures, but the kids had to figure out without it.
Feedback:
3 years old children had a lot of interest in the pictures and had quite a few ideas about them. They were active in thinking about them and they loved the game afterwards, too.
A  little mind flow examples:
About the pictures (telling about what it was there):  dog, cat, elephant. boy, a mum with 7 children- we came through that one that it is a teacher and I asked how does she look like. They said she looked  tired and then we tried to find some other pictures where objects looked tired. Then when we came across some others we asked how that one looked like and they told sad and happy and hungry as well.  And we also looked at how many there were and what could have happened to them. The teacher was tired because there were children making planes to fly around the class. then I asked what is wrong with that and they said that the plane could have endangered someone in the class and that it was a mess and noisy that that was the reason for being tired.

Preschoolers (6 years)
Feedback: The lesson was not as successful. The children were tired and there were 2 in a really bad mood that made it quite difficult to do something, unfortunately.
I must point out that the lesson was held in the afternoon, because I could not come in the morning and the timing was not very appropriate.
what we did:
The same thing, but first we came to the animals and then to the hungry man and we had some problems with env grouping. We kind of found out that there was a tired teacher, so I asked if there was anyone else looking tired and they put the objects to the places. Then we did similar to a hungry boy picture, but then, there were some pictures that were not really correlating, like a tree. So I asked why the tree could be there and they said that it was because it was without leaves and that made it hungry. The children were tired so it was difficult to make anything.  Some were really into it, but the others prevailed, so I made the same game and we played it a bit.