Emotion cards give a feeling a place to be pointed at. This page lets you build that deck yourself. Every card carries a drawn face, the feeling word, a body clue that says where the feeling tends to show, and one thing that might help. You choose the feelings, change the words to the ones your family uses, play three short games, and print the deck on one sheet to cut out.

Why a face on its own is harder than it looks

A scowl or a grin seems to explain itself, but the research on how children read faces says otherwise. In a review of that work, Sherri Widen of Boston College describes children sorting expressions into two broad groups at first, feels good and feels bad, and only slowly splitting those into specific emotions, with the adult set of categories probably not settled until the teen years. The same review points out that children tend to grasp a feeling through what causes it and what people do next before they grasp it through a face.

That is why each card pairs the face with a body clue and a helper line, and why the most useful thing to say after a round is usually a question: when did you feel like that?

How the page works

Deal the deck. Start with the six first feelings, happy, sad, angry, scared, surprised and calm, or tap any of the twenty feelings to deal it in. A deck holds twelve cards, exactly one printed sheet, and the page says so rather than squeezing in a thirteenth.

Make each card yours. Hold a card to change it. Switch angry to mad, write down what you really see when your child is worried, or replace the suggested helper with the one that works in your house. Anything you write shows in handwriting, on screen and on the printed card.

Play. Three games share one record.

• Guess the face works like classic feelings flashcards. The card flips with its word covered, your child names the face, and you mark named it, said another feeling, or skipped.
• Match is the emotions matching game: four faces on one side, four words on the other. Your child taps a face and then its word, and a pen line joins the pair. A wrong first pick counts as a mix-up, and the reading remembers which card was picked.
• Charades turns the deck around. You draw a card, act the feeling out without words using its body clue, and your child guesses.

Reading the deck

The reading sorts the deck into feelings your child names easily, feelings that get mixed up (and with which word), and feelings that get skipped. A card counts as easy once it is named in at least two of every three tries, and each card remembers only its last ten, so an early stumble fades as the word settles in. One tap deals a practice round of just the tricky cards.

Changing a card's word starts its tries over, because the old answers were for a different word, and mix-ups with that card show its new word. Taking a card out takes its tries with it, and a card you deal back in later starts clean.

What the evidence does and does not say

Children who understand more about emotions tend to get along better with other kids and show fewer behavior problems. A meta-analysis of those studies by Christopher Trentacosta and Sarah Fine found the links to be small to medium in size, and a link on its own cannot show that practicing feeling words causes anything. Schools take naming seriously as well: RULER, the approach from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, counts labeling emotions with a nuanced vocabulary among its five skills. RULER is a whole-school program with trained staff, though, and a deck of cards is a far smaller thing.

Read the results as a note about practice, not a measurement of your child. Mixing up two feelings that sit close together, such as surprised and scared, is an ordinary step on the way to telling them apart. If something about how your child handles big feelings worries you, a pediatrician or a teacher who knows them is the right person to ask.

Printing and playing well

Print on card stock if you have it. Each card is roughly two and a half inches square, and the dashed lines are the cut lines. The second sheet is the emotions matching worksheet: every face sits above an empty glue box, and a strip of words at the bottom gets cut apart and glued into place. Teachers can hand a sheet to each child or deal the cut cards face down on a table.

Play at a calm moment, when your child is rested and curious. Mid-meltdown the words are hard for anyone to reach, and the cards will keep. Short rounds a few times a week are easier to keep going than one long session.

With a group of children, Feelings Bingo keeps everyone playing at once. Once the words come easily, The Feelings Thermometer adds how big a feeling is, and The Feelings Check-In Chart turns naming into a small daily habit.