Dramatic play activities allow the young child to explore a range of emotions through role-playing scenarios. Whether the child is working through anger issues by pretending to be an angry monster or exploring how her friend felt when she lost her favorite toy by acting out the actual event, preschoolers can use dramatic play as a means to get a better grip on powerful emotions. By recreating experiences that bridge a number of different emotions, the child can develop a higher degree of competency in this important area. Teachers (or parents) can set up dramatic play activities that promote emotional competence by providing the child with dress-up clothes and props for role playing and/or starting out dramatic, emotion-filled scenes.
For millennia people have used the visual arts to express powerful, joyous or even scary emotions. Young children are no different than their more mature counterparts when it comes to using a pencil or paint brush to explore how they feel inside. Preschool teachers and parents can use art activities with young children to encourage emotional competency skills, such as recognizing, expressing and identifying specific feelings. Kids can draw pictures of how they feel or use an art process, such as painting with a brush, to represent an emotion. For example, give a preschooler a rainbow palette of paint colors, a long brush and blank paper. Invite the child to choose colors that represent how she feels (e.g., yellow for happy) and paint in strokes to match her emotions.
Socializing and group play provide key activities that will help to enhance the preschooler's budding emotional development. Simple board games, card games, block building and toy play can all aid in the positive skill building process. Children who are playing together in a group must negotiate their own emotions, such as anger or jealousy, as well as those of their peers. For example, set up a toy car race with four children. Invite the children to work together to decide on who gets which car and who gets what starting position. During the course of this group play the children must regulate their own emotions when making decisions as well as when someone wins and loses.
Although early literacy activities are crucial on their own to the growing preschooler's development, they can also help to build emotional competency. By reading books to young children on feelings, both recognition and appropriate expression, preschoolers can begin to grasp these often abstract concepts. Try a variety of easy-to-follow picture books, such as "The Feelings Book" by Todd Parr, "Everybody Has Feelings" by Charles E. Avery or "When Sophie Gets Angry- Really, Really Angry" by Molly Bang. Instead of simply reading the book to the preschooler, make it interactive. Stop at interesting points and ask the child what she thinks. Have pre- and post-book reading discussions about emotions, what happened in the book and how the characters may have felt.