How are you feeling today?
It’s a simple enough question, and one we’ve probably asked and been asked countless times. But for young kids, it may not be so easy to answer, as they are still learning to identify and express the emotions they are experiencing.
Thankfully, play is a great way to learn about big feels — especially with the new Express Your Feelings Sensory Bottles from hand2mind. Designed for kids ages 3 and up, this set includes four sensory bottles that each represent a different emotion.
The featured feelings in this set are Happy, Sad, Scared, and Angry. Each of the four bottles has the same shape (a chunky hourglass that’s perfect for small hands!) but each one features a facial expression and color to match its emotion. Happy is yellow, sad is blue, scared is green, and angry is red.
To further personify the different feelings, the contents of each bottle are slightly different. Sad, for example, has a blue, slime-like compound while happy has golden glitter. As kids turn, tip, and move the bottles, the contents will move and flow in different ways. Between the colors, faces, and different sensory experiences, these bottles provide a variety of visual cues for identifying these feelings.
While kids can enjoy the bottles independently as a sensory play activity, the best value of the toy comes with adult-guided, interactive play. The set — like most hand2mind products — comes with an activity guide for adults. Inside, you will find ideas for using the bottles to start conversations about emotions in a way that is positive, productive, and proactive. For example, you can encourage kids to choose a bottle that represents how they are feeling in the moment, then they can shake, swirl, and rotate the bottle as they work on processing that feeling. As kids become familiar with the bottles and the feelings they represent, they can become a helpful tool for kids to communicate how they are doing on any given day.
In addition to being great for social-emotion learning, these bottles are sturdy, tightly sealed, and easy to store back in the box after playtime.
We have a good feeling about these sensory bottles! They are available to preorder now from hand2mind and will be shipping this spring.
