Emotional Learning and Crafts with "Happy” by Mies van Hout
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Learning about emotions with crafts, imitation, and “Happy” by Mies van Hout
In our own little Homeschool, we talked about emotions the other day. Some essential emotions - like happy, sad, angry - have been on the radar for some time, and our son has been observing and practicing his facial expressions in the mirror quite extensively. So now I wanted to make use of Mies van Hout’s expressive book of emotions “Happy”. Every page contains its own fish and a clear visualisation of the emotion the fish is having. Jealous, brave, shocked and other emotions vividly come to life with the amazing illustrations.
We first introduced the book and looked at every fish, trying to imitate the facial expressions while labelling the emotion we were seeing. Afterwards, we wanted to get crafty by creating our own emotional fish. It was fascinating to observe our son switching from seeing the facial expressions towards creating himself. He was very keen on trying the expressions himself. He couldn’t (yet) relate to every single fish he saw, but I am positive we will come back to it regularly with specific emotions in mind. When it was time to get creative, he knew exactly what he wanted to draw, and then asked for seeing that particular fish again. Funnily, his stamina to get his ideas to paper folded half way through, so we have an unfinished fish half-full of blue sadness and a colourful fin.
Truth to be told, soaking in every picture in the book and parsing that emotion is too much in one go. Ideally, pick a few that spark the most interest and focus on those. Alternatively, pick expressions that have reference to what your child is feeling right now. This way, you can dive deeper and create your own fish based on the most prominent feeling.
Similarly to the session about the song “Sopa” by Palavra Cantada, I again found it important to go with the flow, and let our child lead, rather than prescribing certain actions. All in all, I’ve been very happy with the outcome of the session and I can’t wait to pick up the book again with him.
