Emotion Freeze

little girl smiling
  1. Indoor Game
  2. virtual

  • Any Size

  • Grades 1-5

  • No equipment needed

  • 10 minutes or more

Development Goal

Kids will create facial expressions and body actions to express 4 feelings. Players try not to match the coaches emotion. By acting out emotions with body movements, students learn to express different feelings through their actions and facial expressions.

SEL skills being practiced: Self Awareness (Identify Characteristics, Identifying Strengths, Self-Confidence, Decision Making, Physical Self Awareness), Self Management (Responsibility, Resilience, Motivation, Active Listening, Self Control)

Before You Start

  • This game is designed for a virtual environment.
  • Prepare a visual with the name of the emotion and a drawing/face/emoji that represents the emotion.
  • Prepare your own emotional actions, expressions, and sounds to demonstrate for the player.

Set Up

Clear a play space for you to move, jump, dance around.

How to Play

  • This game is called Emotion freeze.
  • There are 2 objects of the game:
    • create actions, sounds and facial expressions for 4 emotions
    • try not to match the coach when they shout out an emotion
  • The emotions for the game are cheerful, frightened, silly, miserable (or, any 4 different types of feelings that you want to use)
  • Coach demonstrates his/her/their emotions one at a time (ex. Frightened=facial expression surprised/biting nails, sound “EEEEEEKKKKKK!” and action might be running in place) and then asks player to come up with their own version of frightened and practice it.
  • Continue demo/practice for each emotion.
  • After all 4 emotions have been practiced, Coach tells players that he/she/they will count to 5 with their back turned while players chose one of the emotions to act out.
  • Coach counts slowly “1-2-3-4-5” and then shouts out “Freeze”. When Coach turns around he/she/they say “Now I’m feeling ____________________ ” (one of the 4 emotions). If a player is frozen in that emotion, they are asked to do 5 jumping jacks, sit down and take 5 deep breaths, or another action before they can play the next round.
  • Play as many rounds as time allows.
  • Close with a challenge for kids to play at home and to come up with new emotions and actions.