Small children may enjoy emotion coloring activities. Print out coloring pages that express various types of emotions such as sadness, happiness, anger and confusion. Help the kids cut out their colored pages and glue them onto construction paper to make emotion books. Align all the pages and use a hole punch to make holes in the left-hand-side binding of the construction pages. Use string or yarn to tie the pages in place. The kids can then create a story line explaining why the girl on the page is crying or expressing a particular emotion. You can have children with a limited vocabulary just write down each emotion at the bottom of the page.
Read books about emotions and encourage the kids to display some of the emotions presented in the books. Talk about their feelings after reading, and find out which feelings they are the most comfortable expressing in front of others and why. The kids may enjoy books such as "The Feelings Book" by Todd Parr or "Glad Monster, Sad Monster" by Anne Miranda, with illustrations by Ed Emberley.
Encourage the kids to participate in role playing activities about emotions. Split the kids up into groups of two and ask them to come up with their own skit about feelings. For instance, they could create a story about a little kid who cried because he needed help and no one would help him until he found a happy turtle who turned his frown into a smile. Encourage the kids to come up with their own skits based on what they understand about feelings. Allow the kids to demonstrate their skits in front of the class after they have had ample time to practice.
Help your students make a feelings stamp collage. Buy different colored ink pads such as yellow, orange, blue, red, green, pink and purple. Choose stamps that express emotion such as a happy face, sad face, funny faces and other facial expressions. In addition, find stamps that can elicit certain emotions such as a stamp of a family, pet, flower, house or bunny rabbit.
Give the children white cardstock paper and encourage them to create a stamp collage with stamps of their choosing. Some kids may want to associate certain stamps with particular colors. For instance, they can stamp a sad face on a blue ink pad and choose pink and yellow for happy faces. The kids can also draw pictures and add other items to the collage such as pressed flowers.