For the emotions activity, you will need some index cards, a marker and a safety pin. Write out a basic emotion on each index card with your marker. For example, you could write "happy," "sad," "angry" or "relaxed." Choose one student to stand in front of the other students and attach one card to his back with a safety pin without him seeing the card. Have him turn around and allow the other students to view which emotion is written on the card. Then, have the other students state a sentence that describes that emotion. For example, if the card said "happy," a student might say "I feel this way when I eat my favorite food" or "I feel this way when I play with my puppy." Then the student standing in front of the class should try to guess what emotion is written on the card.
The picture game is a simple activity where you show fourth-graders a picture and they have to draw conclusions about what is happening. This can be done by cutting out four or five pictures from a magazine. Have students guess the location of the picture, the relationships of people in the picture and what emotions the people are feeling. Doing so should help them form deductive reasoning about the activity happening in each picture.
Another activity revolves around the classic game of Show and Tell, but with a twist. For this game, you should bring in four or five objects to show to students. For best results, the objects should be something that most fourth-graders aren't familiar with. Tools and kitchen utensils, such as a wrench or a garlic press, can be good examples. Hold each object up in front of students and have them deduce what the object is used for by observing its qualities.
An additional game requires showing fourth-graders a scene from a children's television show or movie without sound. For this activity, show students approximately five minutes of a show or movie on mute. Afterward, students should try to figure out what activities were happening, what the conversation was about and which emotions the characters were experiencing. Doing so should help fourth-graders draw conclusions by making observations with limited information.