Become Your Own Emoticon!
Dear Family,
Today we learned how to express our emotions in positive ways. We played our very own
Emotion Pictionary game to learn about types of emotions, discovered different ways to express
our emotions, learned tips for how to take portraits and created our
own personal emoticons so that we can share with you how we are
feeling.
Every youth picked 4-6 emotions. Their teammates took pictures of
them expressing those particular emotions on an iPad 2. Then each
youth put their photos into a collage and printed it (or, if there were
printer problems, we will email this to your Family soon).
Everybody is taking home their own personally created emoticons that they can hang up on the
refrigerator or bedroom door, or put somewhere safe where the Family can share them.
Youth were encouraged to share these photos with you and to update them as often as possible
with a sticky note or magnet indicating which emotion they are feeling at that particular time,
whether it is happy, worried, angry or relaxed, and why they are feeling that way. We hope that
this is a tool that your Family can use to communicate and share emotions in a positive way.
Your upcoming deployment is going to be difficult, so it is very important for your youth (and
you) to find an avenue to express yourselves. Talk with your youth about what that avenue might
be, whether it’s journaling, sharing their emoticons, creating artwork or something completely
different. Allow them the option to keep it private or to share it with you as needed.
Throughout today’s activities, youth worked on developing their communication, selfresponsibility and decision-making skills, as well as strengthening their emotional and social
resilience skills. Hopefully you will see these skills shine throughout this deployment experience.
Thanks for helping your youth participate in this OMK Tech Discovery experience!
Best regards,
Conversation Starters:
● What is your favorite positive emotion? Why?
● If you had to assign an animal to this emotion, what would it be?
● What animal might express a negative emotion? Why?
● If you kept a journal, would you fill it with words, pictures or both?
● Does technology help you express your emotions? How?
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Become Your Own Emoticon!