Healthy Coping Skills for Managing Big Emotions

As teachers of passionate young people, we’ve all seen students respond inappropriately to an emotion they are experiencing. There’s the child who lashes out physically when another child angers them, the child who uses avoidance as a strategy when faced with a situation that makes them anxious, or the child who deals with excitement by distracting everyone else around them. Of course, there is a more effective way of dealing with all of the above situations – that’s where healthy coping skills come in!

Healthy coping skills are those that enable our students to manage their emotional state in a way that builds and reinforces relationships with others and themselves, rather than damaging them. As educators, it is important to both teach and model these healthy coping skills to our students so that they become second nature and can drawn upon by our students throughout their lives.

This set of four cut-and-paste worksheets has been designed by our experienced teacher team to help empower your students to identify and manage big emotions. Students are required to:

1. Identify the healthy coping skills among the list of coping skill options provided. (Note: Some of the options provided are unhealthy coping skills.)
2. Cut out the healthy coping skills and paste them into the boxes provided. 

The emotions covered in this worksheet pack are:

• Anger
• Sadness
• Worry
• Excitement

This resource downloads as a black-and-white PDF or an editable Google Slides file.

By engaging with this resource, your students will be learning vital emotional awareness and coping techniques that they will carry with them well past their days as a student in your class!

Healthy vs Unhealthy Coping Skills

One of the most important distinctions made by this resource is that some coping skills are healthy, while others are not. It is important to emphasize this point when having discussions with your students about coping skills. Some unhealthy and healthy coping skills listed in the resource are outlined below:

Unhealthy Coping Skills 

• Lashing out physically
• Lashing out verbally
• Destroying or damaging property
• Lying to others
• Controlling behavior
• Passive-aggressive behavior
• Avoidance

Healthy Coping Skills

• Physical activity
• Breathing exercises
• Positive self-talk
• Seeking help from others
• Distractions, e.g. drawing
• Journalling
• Meditation or yoga

Download These Managing Emotions Worksheets

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

As this resource contains answer sheets, we recommend printing off one copy of the entire file, removing the answer sheets, the printing the required worksheet pages for your students.

This resource was created by Lisamarie Del Valle, a teacher in Florida and a Teach Starter collaborator.

More Teacher-Made Resources to Explore Healthy Coping Skills

Click below for a sample of Teach Starter’s extensive collection of resources for teaching your students about healthy coping skills.

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