Emotion works.
What is Emotion Works
Emotion Works is a colourful education programme designed to help children and young people learn emotional language, develop emotional understanding and manage feelings and emotional behaviours.
This programme was originally developed by Speech Therapists and is used to ensure our children are happy, settled and confident and ready to learn.
Emotion Works is an educational programme that puts learning at the heart of emotional health and well-being. In Tor Bank we use it as a basis for literacy lessons and integrate it into our assemblies.
This is the 'Cog Model' that the programme is based on.
It breaks the topic of emotion down into 7 different parts but also shows how they all fit together to help children to learn how 'emotions work'.
EARLY LEVEL
Depending on pupil levels/abilities we focus on building and developing emotional language. We encourage pupils to think about other emotions; moving on from just ‘happy’ or ‘sad’. Staff act as models labelling and identifying emotions in real life situations.
FIRST LEVEL
The next level is to explore the yellow cog; looking at various triggers/causes for different emotions. We use stories, films, music, art and daily situations to discuss these.
The red cog encourages us to think about how the emotion makes us feel
inside i.e. butterflies in our tummy, feeling hot, shaky or sweaty etc.
The green cog is the behaviour cog. This looks at what do we do to show how we are feeling? What actions, facial expressions movements? Is this behaviour okay, and if not what could we do instead? This cog is important as we need to ensure our young people are expressing their emotions in healthy and safe ways.
The blue cog is our regulation strategy. Here we explore what strategies we could use to cheer up or calm down if the emotion
we are experiencing is a negative one.
Different children will have different strategies. This may take some time to find what works for our children and young people.
SECOND LEVEL
The grey cog focuses on the intensity of the emotion i.e. on a scale of 0-10 how happy are you? A little or a lot.
The purple cog is the influences cog where we look at the wider context, thinking about if there is anything significant about the situation or the person involved. Both of these cogs can be trickier to understand so everyone works at a level which suits them, focusing on a 5 cog level if this is more suitable.
