Strategies combining movement with expressing feelings motivates students to improve their self-regulation skills. Movement activities that involve emotion expression are especially helpful for motivating students who have behavioral, developmental, trauma history and/or sensory processing challenges. Movement activities are fun and can easily be integrated into strategies to encourage the expression and understanding of feelings.
A strategy for young students that integrates movement with expressing feelings is Feelings Goose. This is a modification of duck-duck-goose in which the student who is “it” touches each peer on the head with alternating hands, while naming a feeling (e.g., sad). When the student touches a child on the head while expressing the opposite feeling (e.g. glad) he is chased as he attempts to run to the other student’s spot.
A strategy that has several variations for progressively older students is switch hands toss. The switch hands toss “favorites” strategy involves students passing a beanbag while expressing their favorite: sport, color, ice cream, team, vacation place, coping strategy, quality in picking a friend, what makes them a good friend, and other favorite categories. Students can pick a favorite category to lead if they are willing to go first in expressing their favorite. The “I feel” strategy involves expressing how they currently feel. In “Guess the feeling” a student acts out a feeling using their face and body and the student they throw the beanbag to guesses what they are feeling.
The most challenging switch hands toss strategy is the “I message”. An I message is a DBT statement in which a student describes an action that others do, how they feel in response, and what the behavior they want others to do. The student says “When people ______, I feel _________, so please. A positive example is “When people say hi to me, I feel happy, so please say hi when you see me”. An example of a complaint would be “When people call me Shortie, I feel angry, so please call me John”. Combining movement with expressing their feelings motivates students to actively express feelings and improves self-control.
