My Day in Faces — The Feelings Footpath

The child lays out today as a path of four or five moments and puts a feeling face on each — seeing in one glance that feelings come, change and go.

  1. Draw a wiggly path on a long strip of paper (or lay four or five paper “stepping stones” in a row on the floor).
  2. Together choose the stops along today’s path — for example waking up, preschool, lunch, playground, bath. Draw a tiny picture for each.
  3. At each stop ask, “How were you feeling then?” The child draws a face on a sticky note or small paper circle and places it on the stop.
  4. Ask the why for at least two stops: “What made you grumpy at getting-up time?” “What happened at the playground that made you so happy?”
  5. Stand back and look at the whole path. “Look — grumpy, then excited, then sad for a bit, then happy. The sad feeling came… and then it went. Feelings don’t stay forever.”
  6. Add your own faces to the same path in a different colour, so the child sees that your day had ups and downs too.

Variation: walk the floor path and act each feeling at its stone, or do a tomorrow path — “How do you think you’ll feel at each stop tomorrow?”

Requirements

  • Space: A table for the paper path, or about 2–3 meters of floor for stepping stones
  • Surface: Table or clear floor
  • Materials: Long strip of paper or 4–5 sheets; crayons; sticky notes or small paper circles
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; siblings can add their own paths
  • Supervision: Light — adult prompts the stops and asks the questions

Rationale & Objective

A 5-year-old in the grip of a feeling tends to experience it as total and permanent. Siegel & Bryson’s Whole-Brain Child strategy “let the clouds of emotions roll by” teaches children that feelings are temporary states that come and go — “I feel sad,” not “I am sad” — and the strategy of replaying the day helps the child put experiences into an ordered story. Laying the day out as a path makes both ideas visible. Each stop also practises the two core skills of this subdomain: naming one’s own emotion and identifying what caused it. Research by Lagattuta & Wellman (2001) shows that between ages 3 and 7 children become increasingly able to connect present feelings with earlier events, and the family-conversation literature (Dunn, Brown & Beardsall, 1991; Fivush, Haden & Reese, 2006) links this kind of talk about the child’s own recent experiences to stronger later emotion understanding. Unlike a single how-do-you-feel-now check, the path shows change over time.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: puts the same face (usually happy) on every stop; reports the current feeling for the whole day; cannot say why
  • Developing: chooses 2 different feelings across the day; gives a cause for one of them; needs your reminders of what happened at each stop
  • Proficient: recalls and names a fitting feeling for most stops using 3+ different feeling words; explains the cause for at least two; notices that a feeling changed
  • Advanced: describes what made a feeling change (“I was sad, then Kuba asked me to play”); uses precise words (disappointed, proud); predicts feelings for tomorrow’s path with reasons

Safety Notes

  • Low physical risk; if using paper stepping stones on a smooth floor, tape them down or play barefoot so they do not slide
  • Accept every face the child chooses — do not argue (“you weren’t sad, you had a lovely time”) or steer them toward happy faces
  • Do not turn the path into a behaviour review of the day; it is about feelings, not about whether the child was good
  • Avoid doing it during or right after a meltdown — wait until the child is calm and connected
  • If the path is filled with sad, scared or angry faces day after day for two weeks or more, or the child reports being hurt or frightened by someone, talk to their teacher and your pediatrician

Hints

  • Playfulness: drive a toy car or walk a figure along the path, stopping at each “station” to report the feeling. Let the child stick your faces on for you by guessing how you felt
  • Sustain interest: do a weekend path, a holiday path or a birthday path; keep a few old paths and compare — “which day had the most different feelings?”
  • Common mistake: too many stops. Four or five is plenty — more turns it into a memory test and the feelings talk gets lost
  • Limited space: no paper — count the stops on the fingers of one hand at bedtime and make the face for each finger
  • Cross-domain: putting the day in order builds sequencing and time words — first, then, after lunch (cognitive, language); drawing faces and tiny pictures is fine motor practice; counting how many different feelings is numeracy
  • Progression: three stops with faces chosen from ready-drawn ones → five stops with self-drawn faces → add the why → notice what changed a feeling → add a parent’s path alongside → a tomorrow path predicting feelings

Sources

  • Siegel, D.J. & Bryson, T.P. (2011), The Whole-Brain Child — “Let the clouds of emotions roll by” and “Name it to tame it”
  • Lagattuta, K.H. & Wellman, H.M. (2001), “Thinking about the past: Early knowledge about links between prior experience, thinking, and emotion,” Child Development
  • Dunn, J., Brown, J. & Beardsall, L. (1991), “Family talk about feeling states and children’s later understanding of others’ emotions,” Developmental Psychology
  • Fivush, R., Haden, C.A. & Reese, E. (2006), “Elaborating on elaborations: Role of maternal reminiscing style in cognitive and socioemotional development,” Child Development
  • CASEL — Self-Awareness competency (identifying one’s emotions)
  • Polish Podstawa Programowa wychowania przedszkolnego (2017) — emotional area (recognises and names basic emotions)
  • ASQ:SE-2 — affect items (60-month questionnaire)