Earlier this year we did Sebastian's Roller Skates. When we did I used emotion picture cards for us to review the different emotions and give Munchkin a visual connection between an actual emotion and the word that is used for it. I got the basic picture set from here:
http://do2learn.com/activities/SocialSkills/EmotionAndScenarioCards/EmotionAndScenarioCards.html
The site has quite a few useful tools. I did have to make a card for "shy" but there are blanks for precisely that purpose.
Well, for the last two weeks we've been reading "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day". The title is great. So I pulled the emotion cards back out and we reviewed them as we read through the book. And we reviewed the variety that might apply to each situation that Alexander suffers through during his day. Toward the end I had Munchkin chose and give me the card that he thought best related to the different situations. He did really, really well. He didn't always chose the card that I would have but that wasn't the purpose. The purpose was for him to make a connection between the events and the emotions.
I'm going to keep the cards handy now for us to use with the rest of the stories when appropriate. But one thing that I did discover with this story was that Munchkin was over empathizing with the main character, Alexander. He seemed to think that he was having, or going to have, a bad day as well. So we are going to add that to the pile of things to work on. Specifically, we are going to spend some time working on the difference between real and pretend. We will also work on him understanding that just because it happens in a story/movie, whether real or pretend, doesn't mean it will happen to him.
But I'm also happy that he made an emotional connection with the story, even if it was a confused one. It's a good sign for positive connections to the world around him rather than getting lost in his own world.
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