Episode 44 - Building emotional vocabulary

Dr. Gail Joseph joins us to discuss the importance of helping build your child's emotional vocabulary during the preschool years. Dr. Joseph is the Bezos Family Foundation Distinguished Professor in Early Learning at the University of Washington.

Building Emotional Vocabulary

Episode 44

Guest: Dr. Gail Joseph has written extensively about the importance of building emotional vocabulary in young children. Dr. Joseph is the Bezos family distinguished professor in the early learning, and the founding director of cultivate learning at the University of Washington.

Why is Building Emotional Vocabulary in young children so critical

It is an important foundational skill for young children throughout their life.
It has specific function in terms of being able to increase a child's ability to regulate their own emotions, as well as lending it to their interpersonal interactions with others.
Strong emotional vocabulary helps them regulate or express their thoughts, and get their needs met in a healthy way.

Teaching young children how to identify emotions in themselves and in others

Help them identify emotions based on somebody's face on how they might be feeling and how they sound
Help them observe and understand the situational cues.
Helping kids read somebody else’s emotions at a young age is important to their ability to interact with other people.
Help them build a high emotional quotient which will be really important in later years

What are the Common Emotional Words based on research

Most 3 year olds at the beginning of the preschool year know the basic feelings like, happy, sad and mad.
We need to build a stronger emotional vocabulary throughout preschool and early elementary years.
One way to do it is to go beyond happy, sad and mad. Adding words like, feeling frustrated, overjoyed, encouraged, included or feeling loved
In the classrooms adding one word in weekly lessons and reinforcing it at home and school.
Kids in their preschool years get really excited and want to share and impress people, parents teachers by using the new words that they have learnt

Incorporating Positive Emotional Vocabulary

Use more emotion words and encourage children to notice when they are feeling calm content and happy vs when they are in a stress mode.
Expand the amount of time that children recognize what being calm feels like, what feeling content feels like.
Find the right opportunities to build the positive emotional vocabulary

Role of Books
One great way to expand vocabulary in general and emotional vocabulary is through books.

Choose colorful books that are about feelings, expressing different emotions.
Thinking ahead before reading with children about the different emotion words and pointing out what the characters might be experiencing and even writing those words down
Read aloud, stop and pause and point the facial expressions and ask children if they can imagine how they're feeling
While reading with young kids pause and have a little bit of a dialogue about the feeling. Include questions like, “How would you feel? How do you think they feel the same way? Or do you think they might feel different?” Can be a great way to build the vocabulary.

Suggested Books: Glad Monster, sad Monster by Ed Amberley
My Many Colored days by Dr Seuss
How are you Peeling Foods with Moods by Saxton Freyman
When Sophie Gets Angry- Really Really Angry by Molly Bang

Emotional Coaching By Parents

When reading with your child, you know his or her experiences. Try to help them think about times where they've experienced all these different emotions and connect to the book that way.
Another strategy that is really helpful is to use emotional coaching with your child and incorporate that into daily routines.
Incidental teaching: Just pausing and taking time throughout the day creating labels for children and for yourself expressing how they are feeling and how you are feeling.

Helping Young Children Regulate their Emotions

It is important to teach children to calm down when they are having a meltdown and get out of the red zone and back into being calm.
Show and Tell
- Show them a drawn thermometer. It would have different colors from going from blue at the bottom all the way up to very red at the top. Children really like to associate their feelings with those different colors on the emotional thermometer ,like feeling blue is feeling happy and some other words that make you feel really good, feeling calm, feeling content , feeling included

And then we can go all the way up to feeling irate or feeling really angry or feeling really disappointed and helping children identify what is that feeling that they experienced that really starts to overwhelm them.