Emotion Hunt

Emotion vocabulary cards

Two dozen emotion words on cards. Match a feeling to each moment in the passage, then explain the choice. The explaining is the work — picking the emotion takes seconds and defending it takes the rest of the lesson.

Fast to start, hard to finish. Choosing is easy; saying which line put it there is not.

It surfaces disagreement. Two children rarely pick the same feeling for the same moment.

Prints a blank sheet. One row per moment, with room to explain.

Match them on the whiteboard · printing the sheet is free

The sheet it prints

The printable emotion hunt sheet — rows for each moment with room to explain.

How do you teach emotion vocabulary?

Give children more feeling words than they would reach for on their own, and make them choose between them. Emotion Hunt is a set of two dozen emotion cards to cut out and use — matched to a moment in the text, or picked up for their own writing — so sad has to compete with grief, homesickness and shame.

Why do children only use happy and sad?

Because those are the words they own. They recognise plenty more when reading and cannot retrieve them when writing, which is a vocabulary gap rather than a comprehension one. Having the words physically in front of them closes it faster than a word mat on the wall.

How do you use the cards in reading?

Read a passage and ask which card fits the character now. Then ask which card fitted two pages ago. The change between the two is where the discussion is — and children who could not have named either feeling will point at the right cards.

How do you use them in writing?

Give each child a card at random and ask them to write the moment without using the word on it. Showing rather than telling stops being an instruction and becomes the actual task, because the one word they want is the one they are not allowed.

How do you make it harder or easier?

To start, six cards with clearly different feelings. Then the full set, which includes several near-misses on purpose. To stretch a class, ask them to place two cards on the same moment and explain how a character can feel both at once.

From the classroom

The near-misses are the whole value. Cards that are close together — nervous, anxious, uneasy — produce arguments about shades of meaning that you could not set up deliberately without it feeling like a worksheet. Keep them in an envelope per table and they last the year. And do not laminate them before you have run it once; you will want to write two or three of your own in after the first lesson.

Try it now

Read a paragraph, then ask every child to hold up a card. The spread across the room is the discussion.