Feels Good or Feels Bad? Sort the Faces

A single row of six yellow faces runs across the top of this Kindergarten sorting page, each in a small cream card with an orange dot beneath it. At the bottom sit two large boxes with dashed tops, labelled Feels good and Feels bad. The child draws a line from every face down into the box where that feeling belongs: the grin, the laugh and the calm smile go one way, the frightened face, the sad frown and the wincing face go the other. No feeling word is printed on the page, and three faces belong in each box.

This page asks about valence, not vocabulary: not what the feeling is called, but whether it is comfortable or uncomfortable to have. That is why faces the word pages leave out can appear here — a laughing face or a wince does not need a name to be sorted. It is also why a child who cannot yet read any of the feelings words can complete the page alone. The interesting ground is the middle: the teacher listens for a child saying that a face could go either way, and asks why.

It prints on one sheet; a pencil and a ruler make the six lines tidy but neither is essential. The page is the odd one of its family — every sibling works with a feeling word, and this one works with the feeling itself. Use it first with children who are not yet reading, then go to the match-the-face-to-the-word page once the good and bad sides are secure.