The Children with Big, Big Feelings: How a Pre-K Class Learned to Ask, “What do you need?” through PBL
Working in the early years has taught me a lot about some fundamental principles of teaching any age group: learning can only happen when children feel safe, and building socio-emotional learning into your content gives children authentic opportunities for learning and applying skills that help them connect to themselves and to others.
Inevitably, particularly in preschool and pre-k, many children need support in saying goodbye to their families and coming into the classroom. Some of my children have never been to school before, and not for a whole school day. It can be scary to see a room full of people you’ve never met who you’re now asked to spend a whole day with, that you have to share materials with, sit next to, and teachers who expect you to go along with all of it. There are, understandably, a lot of big feelings.
For this reason, I love starting each year with a project that helps us build community and encompasses many aspects of identity: our names, what we look like, our families, and our feelings. I like to spend a lot of time exploring a range of feelings and giving my children an opportunity to practice naming their feelings, trying on unfamiliar ones, and developing strategies for managing them in developmentally appropriate ways.
Welcoming All Feelings
A few years ago, one of the children in my class was brand new to school. He had been with very few children throughout Covid, and had been at the same small home daycare since he was a baby. Needless to say, coming to a big school building and entering a classroom with 16 other 4-year-olds, and two masked teachers, was a shock for him. He had a hard time settling in, and we noticed that we, as teachers, were spending a lot of time naming feelings, describing consequences of those feelings, and giving sentence starters to this child and the others for navigating big feelings moments. What would happen if we involved all the children in an exploration of our feelings and made addressing all our big feelings an authentic and visible part of our community?
We decided to launch a PBL unit on feelings, by asking:
How can we support ourselves and our friends in managing big feelings?
Getting to know ourselves and our big, big feelings
By spending time observing our children, getting to know how they tend to self-soothe during big feelings, and what their favorite parts of our classroom were, we knew that our children loved our library area for its cozy qualities, and that they enjoyed creating art involving their beautiful faces, such as self portraits. They would often choose the library/cozy area to calm down, and they responded well to art activities when they were having big feelings. We knew our project on feelings would have to involve lots of read-alouds, possibly the creation of a class book of our own, and artwork featuring the children themselves! While we hadn’t decided exactly what shape the public product would take at this point, we did start brainstorming as a teaching team how we might go about it as we launched our feelings exploration.
We began by “trying on” different feelings through a game with emotions cards. The children were tasked with trying to use facial cues and body language in the images to identify the feeling being expressed, and then show how they might express that same feeling. This activity elicits delight and excitement, and is always fun to play, but is also very helpful for supporting children in reading, identifying, and verbalizing different feelings with specific vocabulary. This helped prepare us all for thinking about how different people experience feelings differently.
We then read some incredibly written and illustrated books about feelings, including The Boy with Big, Big Feelings by Britney Winn Lee, In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek, and Big Boys Cry by Jonty Howley. We used the read aloud texts to invite the children to share their personal experiences feeling various emotions, and they shared ways they liked to make themselves feel better. By stepping into the character’s shoes, the children realized that everyone feels their feelings differently, and everyone needs different things to feel better.
“What can we do if we see a friend having big feelings?” we asked.
“We could give them a hug,” said one child.
“We could bring them a tissue,” said another.”
“We should ask them what they need -- what we can do to help,” shared one girl.
As a class, we agreed that to support each other through big feelings, we could commit to checking on each other and helping how our friends’ want us to.
Developing the project
We knew once we started reading and discussing each text that the style of these illustrations could provide the framework for our art project; the children were captivated by the colors, shapes, patterns, and designs in The Boy with Big, Big Feelings. They were interested in drawing hearts - a challenging shape for young children to draw! - by the page design of In My Heart.
We prepared an art invitation for the children. They engaged with paper, watercolors, and pens. In response to The Boy with Big, Big Feelings, the children were asked to identify a feeling they sometimes feel, where in their body they feel that feeling, and how they could represent it with shapes, colors, lines, or words. They chose all sorts of shapes, various watercolor shades, and interesting placements of their feelings on their bodies.
After reading In My Heart, the children drew heart maps - representations of the things they carry in their hearts, that fill them up with love, and make them feel happy. The children decided to draw an array of things inside their hearts, including family members, sports, and even bacon. They loved revisiting their artwork over the course of many months as it hung on the wall, pointing out things from their work to their friends, noticing new pieces of their friends’ work, and supporting themselves in emotional moments by returning to the things that make them feel good.
Each child’s page about crying was compiled into a class book that the children voted to name “We All Cry” and we added it to our bookshelf for them to read at any time. We noticed that even weeks and months later, as our feelings and identity unit came to an end and we moved on to new topics and themes, the children eagerly awaited our afternoon rest time each day to try to be the first to snatch the book off the shelf to read quietly on their sleeping mats.
These open-ended art invitations allowed the children to interpret what it means to share their feelings in a way that felt relevant to them, and made visible to them just how beautifully diverse their classmates’ emotions and experiences are.
Building a community of empathy
Looking at all of the artwork together presented a clear idea to all of us how important it is to communicate about what we feel, because we cannot assume to know how anyone might be feeling. All of us, including the teachers,came away from this project knowing not only each other better, but ourselves, too. And our child who had struggled to connect now not only had more strategies for naming his feelings and approaching hard moments, he also had a classroom full of friends seeking to understand his big feelings from a place of compassion. The children developed a shared language for talking about their feelings with specific vocabulary words and effective coping strategies. They learned new ways of supporting each other and themselves through the inevitable challenges and stresses of childhood. And because of this, our year progressed on a foundation of empathy.
It is important to note that in our pre-k class, we don’t follow a set socio-emotional learning curriculum because SEL is at the base of our PBL work. We don’t need to set aside a specific amount of time to address predetermined topics and build a list of skills, because at every stage of our learning, we are working through challenging and real socio-emotional dilemmas: solving interpersonal conflicts, turn-taking, listening to others’ perspectives, making decisions together, sharing personal stories, naming our feelings, and more. When we tie our SEL skill-building into literacy, art, and play, it becomes a natural element in the way we experience our daily lives at school, and it creates an opportunity for our class community to grow closer, and grow up together.
Considerations for bringing SEL into your PBL work:
Build relationships. Get to know your children, and use PBL to deepen that knowledge. You can help your students feel seen by offering them opportunities that are relevant to them, and they will reflect more deeply in ways that make the learning personal.
Use read alouds as mirrors and windows. Intentionally-selected texts can offer children opportunities to see themselves and their experiences and feelings reflected (mirrors), and to empathize with children who have different experiences (windows). Sometimes it’s easier to understand what a peer is going through in the form of a beautifully written and illustrated book. Click here to read more about mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.
Invite children to share,and do so often. Part of what made our unit work was that the children constantly had the opportunity to share their work either in group meetings or by visiting their work on the wall. By encouraging the children to share their work, their peers were able to get to know each other and how they work better, which fostered more understanding between everyone. It also nurtured a sense of community, support, respect, and encouragement that enabled the children to continue to engage in personally relevant work at school.
Lisa Goddard is a Reggio-inspired curriculum coach for a non-profit organization as well as a pre-k teacher at a private school in Boston, MA. She is a graduate of Brown University (BA), University of Edinburgh (MS), and Boston University (MEd). When she isn’t in the classroom, Lisa loves running, walking her dogs, traveling, and art.
Connect with Lisa on Instagram at her education consulting page: @ahundredworlds_ed