Emotion Detective Activities

 

Understanding your emotions is an important skill to foster in kids with ADHD as recognising your own feelings and the feelings of others is a necessary part of developing self-awareness and emotional self-control, and is required to effectively negotiate social situations and build and maintain relationships.

Without explicit teaching it is harder for kids with ADHD to develop emotional awareness as they tend to be frequently distracted and have poor self-awareness, and therefore may not be paying attention to their internal clues or the subtle social clues neurotypical kids pick up on.

Playing emotion detective games with your child with ADHD is therefore a great way to teach them about their feelings, as it opens up opportunities for discussion around all different types of emotions, how they may feel in their bodies, and how they may be expressed by others.  

There are lots emotion detective games you can play and you will find many suggestions below. However, before you start playing any of the emotion detective games it is important to first talk about different emotions with your child.

To do this you can use the ‘I’m an Emotion Detective’ worksheet below as a prompt for discussing different emotions, and for asking your child questions like:

• If someone was feeling [emotion] how would you be able to tell?
• What clues could you look for that would give you a hint that someone was feeling [emotion]?
• Have you seen a friend of yours or your brother or sister feeling [emotion]?
• Have you felt [emotion]? What did it feel like in your body?

You can also use the worksheet to look for people portraying each emotion. When they point someone out ask them:

• What clues did you use to determine the person was [emotion]?
• When have you felt that way?

 

Emotion Spotto

Whilst watching TV have a competition to see who can find someone with a particular emotion the most times. Each player yells out ‘spotto’ when they see someone expressing the emotion. (You can also play this game in real life. Just make sure they know to say ‘spotto’ quietly and to not point at anyone).

 

Feelings photographer

Take pictures of people expressing different emotions and create a collage out of them. Ask your child questions like: What clues did you use to decide that person was [emotion]? Have you ever felt that way? What did it feel like in your body?

 

Role Playing

Take turns acting out different emotions whilst explaining why you are feeling that way. For example, you could say something like:

• I feel so angry because I lost my favourite toy!
• I’m really embarrassed because I can’t tie my shoelaces.
• Today was a great day because the sun was shining and I went to the beach. My heart is dancing!
• I feel really lonely because I have no one to play with.
• I’m really excited because I’m going to a birthday party this afternoon.

 

Other ideas

You can also:

• Play emotion charades
• Role play emotions with puppets or toys.
• Make emotion collages out of old magazine pictures.
• Make up emotion stories.
• Create an emotion diary.
• Read books about different emotions.