Emotion Hunt

An emotion vocabulary hunt

Good writers rarely say a character was nervous. They show it: knees shaking, hands gripping a curtain. Children hunt a passage for those words, sort what they find on a feelings scale, and give each one a precise name.

Works on a real passage. A photo of the page you are reading, your own text, or one written for the lesson.

It gets past happy and sad. Each band of the scale offers sharper words: uneasy, nervous, terrified.

Prints the passage and the scale. Underline on page one, sort on page two.

Hunt on the whiteboard together · printing the sheet is free to try

The sheet it prints

The printable emotion hunt sheet: the passage to underline, then a feelings scale to sort onto.

How do you teach emotion vocabulary?

Give children the feelings in a real passage to find, then make them choose a better word than the one they reach for first. Emotion Hunt puts a short passage on the board. The class taps every word or action that shows how a character feels, drags each find onto a feelings scale from very unhappy to very happy, and names it with a precise word from that band.

Why do children only use happy and sad?

Because those are the words they own. They recognise plenty more when reading and cannot pull them out when writing, which is a vocabulary gap rather than a comprehension one. Each band of the scale carries three sharper words (uneasy, nervous, embarrassed), so sad has to compete with something closer to the truth.

How does it work on the board?

Put a passage up with New passage: photograph the page you are reading, paste your own, or have one written around your book or topic. Tap a word to find it; tap the word next to it and the find grows into a phrase, like his knees shook. Drag the find onto the scale, argue about which band it belongs in, then tap a word on that band to name it. The arguing is the lesson.

How do you use it in writing?

Turn it round. Give each child one of the precise words and ask them to write the moment without using it. Showing rather than telling stops being an instruction and becomes the task, because the one word they want is the one they are not allowed.

How do you make it harder or easier?

To start, a passage with one character and three clear feelings, and only the top and bottom of the scale. Then the full scale. To stretch a class, find a moment where a character feels two things at once and ask where on the scale it goes.

A tip

The near-misses are the value. Words close together on the scale, nervous against uneasy, produce arguments about shades of meaning that would feel like a worksheet if you set them up on purpose. Let the class disagree about a band before you settle it.

Try it now

Open the example, cover the scale, and ask the class to find the feelings in the passage before you show them where they went.