Manage ‘Big’ Emotions with an Emotions Wheel

Don’t let their size fool you… our little learners are capable of feeling some very BIG emotions!

Knowing how to self-regulate when in a heightened emotional state can be a challenging task for adults, let alone children! That is why it is vital to teach emotional awareness and self-regulation skills to our students as early as possible. Our students need to be able to:

1. Identify the heightened emotion they are experiencing.
2. Know what strategies they can use to help them calm down.
3. Apply these strategies in order to successfully self-regulate.

When teaching social-emotional learning to students, it is important to actively teach our students a variety of different strategies they can use to process their emotions. This wheel can help students identify the emotion they are feeling and the different strategies they can use to return to stable ground!

How to Use This Emotions Wheel

This resource consists of two pages. The first page contains the emotions wheel. The wheel is structured as follows:

• The centre ring contains emojis to show different emotions.
• The words in the second ring describe the emojis.
• The outer ring contains strategies that students may like to use when they are feeling these emotions.

The second page contains a wedge that can be used to help students identify the specific emotion they are feeling and the strategy they can use to manage this emotion.

To compile the wheel:

1. Cut out the wheel on page 1.
2. Cut out the wedge on page 2. Be sure to leave the centre circle as a pivot point.
3. Place the wedge over the top of the wheel, then insert a brass fastener through the centre circle on the ‘X’.
4. To choose specific strategies, turn the wheel until the emotion being experienced is sitting inside the wedge.

Download Our Version, Or Customise to Create Your Own!

This resource downloads in four separate file formats:

• Colour PDF
• Black-and-white PDF
• Colour Microsoft Word (editable)
• Black-and-white Microsoft Word (editable)

Use the dropdown menu next to the Download button to select your preferred file format.