Feelings Cards for Sorting

    I made this deck of feeling cards because the ones I have purchased commercially have a limited set of emotional expressions.  I think it is an important social/emotional skill to be able to label and express emotions.  I just decided which feelings I wanted to include and used Google Images and typed (feeling term) and face.  Then I selected the one I thought matched clearly the term based on age, gender, ethnicity, added body language cues, and clarity of the image.  I just put them in a word document table and re-sized all the pictures to the same height.  I printed them on the color printer on card stock and laminated.
    One way I used the cards today was with a fourth grade girl who has a limited vocabulary.  Together we went through the words and she sorted them into one of the 3 categories: pleasant; neutral; unpleasant.  I then asked her to discuss a few in each category making a personal connection to the words.  Talking about a personal experience with an emotion is part of the RULER Approach to social and emotional literacy developed at Yale University.  This particular student is a very visual learner; she found it easier to discuss her feelings and how she handled the unpleasant ones she experienced this week much easier with these feeling cards than in prior sessions.
    These cards could very easily be used in small groups, especially groups designed to develop social/emotional skills.  The feeling cards could be used for charades, learning to express feelings using I statements, etc.