Emotions

Brainstorming emotions with 5th hour.

This past week in YESS we began talking about emotions in more detail. We began by trying to brainstorm out as many emotions as we possibly could--shout out to Cora, Chadaey, and Jayleen, all of whom managed to come up with 41, 39, and 32 emotions in less than three minutes! These mentors have a strong EQ and are great about sharing out their knowledge--thanks, ladies!!

An example of the annotated reading we did last week.

As a class, we noted how many different words we can use to describe just one single emotion. For example, if we are sad, we may say we are feeling down, depressed, melancholy, blue, unhappy, miserable, gloomy, or heartbroken. Since there are SO many ways to describe how we are feeling, it is easy to see how miscommunication might occur. Both mentors and mentees did a great job of connecting this point to our lessons last week on communication.

Fabulous notes from a second year mentor!

We took some time to identify the six core emotions--sadness, anger, joy, disgust, surprise, and fear--and then we used some Kagan structures for a reading and writing exercise to learn more about the purpose of emotions. Though it took us two days to work through the reading, I am very proud to say our mentors did a great job of facilitating this activity. Our scholars were required to number the paragraphs, circle key words, and underline main ideas. They worked in groups of four and each member took a turn reading and relaying information to their group members so that all could record notes. We learned a several important facts, such as emotions are adaptions that help us survive and that there are three main components in how we process emotions: subjective, physiological, and expressive. We also noted that emotions give us important information about the world around us, and that others can take cues from our body language to take action to help us, if necessary.

7th hour ladies enjoying some free time on Friday afternoon.

Next week we will work on a group art project that will detail and explain the six core emotions and any/all associations that we have with that particular emotion.