I’M A LION, I’M A TREE

First of all, the students were asked to identify a series of animals and the qualities they were associated with: friendliness, wildness, calm, speed, poison, and so on. Then, they had to connect those qualities to their own attitudes, identifying with the animals and giving names to the behaviors and emotions identified in the previous activity. Cutting out paper letters, they wrote the adjectives and nouns used to name the emotions, and made masks representing the animals they had identified. Then, they had to wear the mask that best suited their mood at the moment: cow for happy, cat for aggressive, and so on. In sum, the masks were used to dramatize the children’s feelings and behaviors.

Emotional color balls were used to link emotions to art. The class agreed on a color code associating different colors to different feelings. Then, they used the colors in the code to paint papier-mâché balls and produce a spherical emotion catalog. At the beginning of each session, each student chose the ball that best represented how they felt and placed them before their faces, the ball’s color reflecting their mood. They were also encouraged to think if their mood could change after sharing how they felt.

In the final activity, the students were covered in tree bark to make a forest. They transformed cardboard into tree bark and wore it around their bodies, thus becoming human trunks. They moved around the school, so that the forest looked dynamic. The idea was to raise awareness of their own body and of spatial skills, improving their relationships with others and the environment.