A Set of Emotions Posters for Your Classroom

Little people, big emotions. This is a notion most primary school teachers would vehemently attest to!

Life can sometimes be an emotional roller coaster for our littlest learners.  Whether they are feeling sad because they were left out of a game at playtime, angry because someone else has the toy they want to play with, or happy because they did something new for the very first time, it is safe to say that our students experience a rainbow of emotions on any given day in our classrooms!

Emotional awareness and self-regulation has become a major focus of the social-emotional curriculum in recent years. That’s why Teach Starter is committed to producing high-quality, age-appropriate resources like this set of emotions posters.

This set of five posters has been created by our experienced teacher team to help you introduce some of the more common human emotions to your younger learners. The posters also suggest some strategies that could be applied by the student to manage each emotion.

The emotions featured in this poster pack are:

• Fear
• Sadness
• Worry
• Anger
• Happiness

This set of emotions posters downloads as a full-colour PDF or an editable Google Slides file. Please download the Google Slides file if you wish to make any personal alterations to the resource.

Display these posters on your classroom bulletin board as a constant reminder to your students of how they can use healthy coping skills to help weather any emotional storm!

Further Uses for These Managing Emotions Posters

While these posters have been designed primarily for the purposes of a classroom display, there are many other ways to use this social-emotional learning resource in your primary school classroom. Here is one suggestion from an experienced member of our teacher team:

Use the posters to stimulate a whole-class discussion about emotions and emotional self-regulation. Display each poster in turn on your interactive whiteboard. You could start by showing the image only (and covering up the rest of the poster), then asking the students:

• How do you think this person is feeling?
• What makes you think that?
• What could have made them feel this way?
• Have you ever felt like this? When?

Such guided questioning allows the students to open up and share their own experiences of feeling each emotion. 

After this discussion, reveal the rest of the poster and discuss the suggested calming strategies for each. Ask the students:

• Which of these calming strategies do you like the best?
• Can you think of a time when you have used any of these calming strategies?
• Can you think of any more calming strategies to add to this list?

The more students share their own experiences, the more they will understand that everyone has feelings and that it is possible to manage these feelings in a healthy and calm way!

Download These Emotions Posters

Use the dropdown menu next to the Download button above to access either the easy-print PDF or the Google Slides version of this resource. (Note: You will be prompted to make a copy of the Google Slides template before accessing it.)

Display the posters in your classroom as a constant reminder to your students of how they can manage their emotions in a positive way!

This resource was created by Lisamarie Del Valle, a Teach Starter collaborator.

More Teacher-Created Emotions Resources

Looking for more activities to enhance your students’ emotional awareness? Explore this great selection of teacher-created resources!

teaching resource

Introduction to Emotions Teaching Slides

Teach your students to understand and manage their emotions with this comprehensive teaching presentation for your social-emotional learning lessons.

teaching resource

Identifying Emotions Interactive Activity

Help your students identify and explore common emotions with this engaging digital activity.

teaching resource

How Big Emotions Feel in My Body – Poster

Help your students identify the signs their body gives them that they are experiencing a ‘big’ emotion with this informative classroom poster.