What is a Feeling
Narrator: Action! Avery, what is a feeling?
Children: A feeling is something on your face.
It’s like a thing that has a lot of emotion.
Happy.
Disappointed.
Bored.
Sometimes they’re big, like this big. And sometimes they’re small, like this.
A big feeling is like when you’re mad. And a small feeling is if you’re just sad a little bit.
Parent 1: So kids get big feelings. Oftentimes the feeling can be very distracting.
Teacher 1: There’s very little progress when feelings are ignored.
Clinical Director: And so if we can dissipate, through conversation, the build-up of that feeling, then we free up the cognitive process to focus on the day of learning.
Parent 1: If you can put a word to a feeling, you’re teaching a child a language.
Narrator: Can you tell me some feelings?
Children: Mad. Sad. Scared. Oh. Frustrated. Angry.
Teacher 1: At Hanna Perkins, the thing that stands out the most is the language we use with children. I’m often asked, where did you learn to talk that way?
Clinical Director: If you’re having a big feeling about this, What can we do to make this feeling smaller?
Parent 1: Hanna Perkins always says it’s hard to wait.
Teacher 1: You’re going to be able to do this. You’re learning. You’re practicing.
Clinical Director: We say two-way feeling. So to have a two-way feeling about something is to both love someone and be angry.
Parent 2: I talk to my kids about their feelings balloons and how if they’re so big eventually they’re going to pop.
Narrator: Do you remember the term “inside helper?”
Former student 1: I do remember the term inside helper, yeah. I carry that with me everywhere I go.
Clinical Director: So the inside helper is a child-friendly way of talking about one’s conscience.
Child: Because you did something that you knew you were not supposed to do, your inside helper can help about it.
Teacher 2: If they’re struggling with knowing what to do in the classroom, we really just ask them to use their inside helper. So, using their conscience to help them figure it out.
Former student 1: Hanna Perkins is totally different. Hanna Perkins is about learning to be a human being.
Former student 2: Being able to be kind to yourself and to nurture yourself and to self-soothe and all of those things that are important when you’re 3 and 5 and 6 and 21 and 50 and 65 and like, it just never stops being important.
Parent 3: I think she’s really great at being able to put emotion into language and I think she helps me a lot with that.
Parent 1: Really the most important thing you can teach your child is to feel like they know themselves, and they can boss themselves to do the thing that makes them feel the proudest.
Child: Cut