Acting Out Emotions

By Jennifer Scotton

My almost three-year-old son has been experiencing a lot of big feelings as he transitions to his new threenager status. To help him better verbalize what he’s feeling, we’ve been working with him on identifying emotions.

We often play a game where I will dramatically act out an emotion — happy, sad, mad, or excited — and let him guess what emotion I’m portraying. He loves taking his turn to be the actor in the game, too! Using this game has helped him learn to better understand and express his needs when emotions run high.