Emotional Awareness Teaching Resources

Build your students' emotional awareness with activities, printables and more social emotional teaching resources designed specifically for elementary and middle school students.

Created by teachers, for teachers, this collection is full of digital and printable activities designed to help students recognize not just their own emotions but those of their peers and learn to put a name to those feelings. Each teaching resource has undergone rigorous review by the Teach Starter team to ensure it's ready for the classroom ... and your students!

Curious about how to help your class develop their emotional awareness in age-appropriate ways? Read on for some tips from our expert teachers!

What Is Emotional Awareness?

A component of self awareness, emotional awareness can be defined as the ability to recognize, understand and effectively manage one's own emotions and the emotions of others. If that sounds like a lot rolled up into one fairly simple definition, we agree.

Emotional Self Awareness in Kids

Teaching kids to be emotionally aware in elementary school requires a lot of practicing and modeling, as well as working with your class to provide them with the vocabulary these little people need to express sometimes very big feelings.

When the youngest children enter elementary school, they may have some of the language already to identify and label basic emotions like happiness and sadness or anger and fear. However at this point, their understanding of complex emotions and the ability to express and regulate their emotions is still typically limited.