Emotions: Sadness

For our home preschool co-op we focused on the theme of emotions for February and talked about happy, sad, love, and silly. Here are some ways we talked about feeling sad:

I have a package of emotion cards from my speech-language pathology days. I chose eight cards (two for each child) and had the kids sort them into happy and sad and asked why they thought the child in the picture was feeling that way.

Using the happy/sad cutouts from above (before they were colored) we sang Smiles, starting with the sad face and turning it upside down to smile at the end. Another cute song is A Smile is Like the Sunshine.

The librarian at our little local library has offered to help me find books for my lessons! She is awesome and my favorite book she picked out is Little Beauty by Anthony Browne. It is adorable and as you can see from the illustration it shows "sad" so well! We also read Llama Llama Misses Mama by Anna Dewdney and Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard. Of course every book has a happy ending :)

The librarian also found a book called When I Feel Sad by Cornelia Maude Spelman that is part of a series on emotions. I decided to copy some of the pages showing reasons why we feel sad and on the opposite side of the page show one way we can be happy. After identifying how we can feel happy we put a smiley post-it on the character's face.

One of the first things the kids ask when they come in the door is "Can we eat lunch?" They are very excited about bringing their own lunch and always seem to have the munchies. For that reason I like to incorporate a little snack when it makes sense. I gave each child a paper with these faces drawn and they added cheerio eyes to make them complete. We labeled each emotion and they snacked.

The kids' favorite part was watching and talking about these videos from the Mormon channel and I was amazed at how concerned they were for the little boy in The Coat. It was very tender!

We also ended up watching these videos because there were on the playlist I was playing from. They both include the emotion of sadness so it actually worked out great!

LDS Nursery Lesson #7: Jesus Christ Created the World for Me

Jesus Christ Created the World for Me

Doctrine (What?): Jesus is our Creator. He created the world as a place for us to be tested, because He loves us. His creations include the sun, moon, stars, land, water, animals, plants, and people.

Principle (Why?): We can feel God's love when we view the creations of the earth.

Applications (How?):

• Display a picture of Jesus and pull out a wrapped present. Ask them who gave them this gift? (Jesus!) Have them open the present. Inside have a picture of the earth and creations. First pull out the earth then have each child place one of the creations on the earth.

• Bring several stuffed animals in a bag. Make the animal sound and have the children guess the animal then give each child an animal. Talk about how Jesus Christ created animals and that He is happy when we take care of them. Pretend to take care of the animals by giving them a hug, feeding them, giving them a drink, washing them, and putting them to sleep. I was surprised at how much the kids in my class LOVED this and they even calmed down and got quiet when we put the animals to bed (one even ran over and turned off the light). You could also sing *The World is So Big and talk about "animals big and animals small."

• Jesus Christ also created animals in the ocean. We took turns fishing for each of these creatures. Over and over again during the lesson I emphasized this sentence "Jesus Christ created _____ because he loves me!"

• Go on a walk outside and find items like grass, sun, trees, dirt, rocks, and flowers. We did not end up going outside but I had planned to show them the sign language for each of these creations in the classroom and then repeat them outside.
• Bring a step stool and a picture of a mountain. Then have each child "climb" a mountain.
• Color the book at the end of the lesson.

*The nursery leader in my ward conducts music time for each nursery class and does an AMAZING job. She incorporates songs that go with the week's lesson so I don't usually do music during my lesson since she is so comprehensive.