Resources: Pens, pencils, emotion fans, feeling scales
Handout 1: The handout provides ‘worry’ scenarios for the children to role-play.
Handout 2: The handout provides a template for the children to write a postcard to their special person.
Use the starter slide to complete an emotional check-in with each other, using emotion fans and the feelings scale.
Introduce the emotion of worry. Use the presentation slides to explain what the feeling is, how it might feel in your body, and what kind of things might cause the emotion of worry. Encourage the children to share their thoughts as worry feels different for everyone.
Normalise the emotion of worry: if comfortable, the teacher should give examples of when they feel worried. Use the video to explain to the children that a little bit of worry can be good: it keeps us safe, and we need to act on it. But if our worry becomes too big, it can slow us down and get in the way. Show the children the flow chart image for when we feel worried: Name the feeling, feel it in your body, check how big it is on the scale, ask yourself: do I need to act?
Task: This activity builds from the previous lesson, with children taking more of an active, independent role. Ask the children to listen to/role-play the ‘worry’ scenarios on the handout and use the flowchart of steps on the slide to choose what action they think would be best to take. The flowchart suggests that the children think about whether they need to share their worry with someone, or whether there is something else they could do. The children should be encouraged to think back to last week and decide if any of those strategies might work. This can be done in small groups, pairs, or independently.
Bring the children back together and reflect on the strategies they chose for the scenarios. Guide them to reflect that telling someone about how you are feeling helps to reduce the size of it. Encourage the children to remember the special person they drew two lessons previously.
Task: Ask the children to write a postcard, using the template on the handout, to their special person letting them know they might choose to share their big feelings with them. If possible, the children could deliver these to their special people in school or take them home to the person in their family/wider family.
The teacher and supporting adults in the room should explain that feeling anxious is a normal part of life. In pairs, allow the children to discuss times they’ve felt worried, how it felt in their body, and what they could do with that feeling next time.
This lesson introduces worry as a normal and even useful emotion, so teachers should be careful to frame it positively rather than as something to be feared or avoided. Sharing personal examples of worry, if comfortable to do so, helps normalise the feeling for children and shows that even adults experience it.
It is important to emphasise that a little worry can be helpful - it keeps us safe and alert - but that it becomes unhelpful when it grows too big. The flowchart (name it, feel it, check the scale, ask if I need to act) gives children a simple, repeatable process they can apply independently, so allow plenty of time for children to practise this during the scenario task.
The teacher should support the children to make the connection between sharing a worry and it becoming smaller, reinforcing the value of speaking to a trusted adult. As with previous lessons, the aim is not to remove or fix every worry a child has, but to help them recognise it, understand it, and know what steps they can take when they feel it.
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