How do you feel today?

How do you feel today? This is a question that all teachers should ask in every class, no matter which subject is. After four years in the Primary Education degree, I can affirm that feelings are as important as any content that we want to teach our students. The teacher needs to know the emotions that his/her students feel to act according to that. If a child feels sad because he/she has any problem, it is better to address this problem first, because it can become a barrier to continue learning. From my view, it is more important that students know what emotions are they feeling and how to regulate them. For this reason, emotions have to be present in the Maths class.

However, can we measure our emotions? Apparently, we can think that emotions are no-measurable reactions, but two years ago, we discovered that we can count them. A teacher in the faculty taught us how to do it. In class, we can work with emotions in many ways. One of the most useful and significant dynamics for children is to associate one emotion with one colour. The book “The colour monster” (“El monstruo de colores”) is so popular because it is a powerful tool which has positive results.

The book establishes six main emotions associated with colours: love (pink), happiness (yellow), calm (green), anger (red), sadness (blue) and fear (black). The following activity that I’m going to suggest was carried out in the faculty with my class and the results were fantastic. First of all, we will ask our students for bringing one button of each one of these previous colours. In class, there will be six containers and each day, at the beginning of the class, all the students will have to put a button in one container, according to the feeling that they have. In this way, we can measure how the class is feeling each day and solve any kind of problem that it happens. The containers and the buttons inside are a visual graphic to represent and measure the emotions. They can also add more buttons depending on how strong the emotion that they feel is. This useful activity can give us a general idea about the mood of the group each day. 

If we can go further with this activity, we will express the results through other kinds of graphics to teach statistics to our students. We can use bar charts or sectors diagrams. For the oldest students, we can also use percentages to represent the data.

Here, there is a home-made video of how to do this activity, though we prefer using another kind of container, like a glass jar.