How Do You Feel? Circle the Face

A picture stands at the top of each of the six numbered cards on this Kindergarten feelings page: a bed, a gold medal, red pajamas beside a crescent moon, a wrapped present, a storm cloud with lightning, and a syringe. Under each picture sit three yellow faces in small white tiles. The child looks at the picture, imagines being there, and circles the one face that shows how they would feel — tired at the bed, happy with the medal, scared of the storm. No feeling word is printed anywhere; the situation is the only prompt and the faces are the only answers.

This is the inference step of the family. On the base page a word is given and a face found; here the child has to work out the feeling from a scene, which is the real-life version of the skill. Each card's three faces include the intended answer and two that do not fit, and across the page the same feeling never turns up on more than two cards, so a child cannot circle happy everywhere and be right. The teacher's question is the title itself, asked aloud at every card. A child who says scared at the syringe and another who says sad are both reasonable — that card is the one worth a conversation.

One sheet, pencil or crayon, six circles to draw. The situations come from a fixed pool of everyday objects — the pool also holds a balloon, a teddy bear and a pillow under the moon — so the page reads the same way whichever six it shows. Follow it with the how-do-I-feel-today check-in, where the situation is the child's own morning, or go back to the match-the-face-to-the-word page if the faces themselves are still uncertain.