Sensation & Emotion Cards
Helping children to recognise, communicate and express their feelings by developing their emotional awareness and vocabulary.
Our beautiful sensation and emotion cards depict a wide range of emotions and with the prompt ‘My… may look and feel…’ each visualise the emotion plus describe some of the features you may see in the facial expression, body language or physiological symptoms, as well as possible sensations or ‘energy’ that may be experienced.
Our cards help children develop the emotional language around feelings, recognise and regulate their own feelings and emotions, as well as learning to recognise and empathise with the emotions of others. Expressing feelings is an important life skill that we all need to learn and is at the heart of emotional wellbeing.
Our unique emotion cards consist of 60 different emotions
Our sensation and emotion cards cover a huge range of emotions such as fear, rage, alone, confusion, jealousy, excitement, hope, and sadness.
The cards place language and words around the physiological experience that a child may feel, helping them to become self-aware and confident in their own expression.
On the flip side
Each emotion card is represented on one side visually along with the physical sensations, facial features or presentation in the body language presented.
On the other side are just the pictures allowing children to interpret the emotion. The children can then use their own words to describe the sensations or emotions they’re feeling.
Developing emotional vocabulary
Developing emotional worlds
Our sensation and emotion cards are an invaluable resource to help children begin to put language to sensations and emotions, to help regulate their emotional world, increase self-confidence, enable aspiration and achievement and contribute to healthier social relationships.
As a therapeutic resource our emotion cards support children’s emotional development by:
Helping children to begin to notice, recognise and express how they are feeling are the first stages in emotion coaching.
Much of the premise for our emotion cards is to promote emotion coaching which supports, regulates and teaches children about their emotional experiences.
Children need multiple, repeated experiences of empathic adults noticing and labelling their emotions and then validating them in a safe, relational way so that all feelings are acknowledged, accepted and safe to have.
This empathic engagement with a child enables a ‘felt’ sense of being understood and activates changes in the child’s neurological system allowing them to calm down, physiologically and psychologically.
Our emotion cards can be used in a number of ways to encourage conversations with children about their feelings and emotions.
We include a booklet that covers 20 therapeutic activities. Our activity ideas are only suggestions and the magic is in their versatility, adaptability and child-friendly images and language. Click here to see our emotions cards activities.
Most importantly it is about the relationship with an empathic adult to help the child feel safe, heard and connected so they can recognise, identify and talk about their feelings.
About the author
Clare Williams, MA, B.Ed Hons
Clare is a primary teacher, educational psychotherapist, educational consultant, trainer and supervisor. Her work in the field of children’s mental health and education is driven by her desire to advocate and inspire schools and pastoral teams to prioritise children’s wellbeing.
About the illustrator
anne waddicor
Anne has worked in the creative communications space for almost 30 years and has run her own design agency since 2011. Anne produces the illustrations, resource artwork, website and manages the marketing and production of all of the resources.
