Emotional Literacy

Firstly, emotional literacy underpins most success and well-being success including

• understanding the school’s and communties requirements in a range of contexts
• the successful use of social skills 
• the development and maintenance of useful habits of mind.

Emotional Literacy is about

• Identifying, relating and communicating one's (emotional) responses to experience, and
• Understanding and appreciating the impact of experience on others

High levels of emotional literacy provides us with valid and comprehensive ‘data’ that then enable us to make well informed decisions and responses to the situations we encounter

The various aspects of emotional literacy include

• Awareness that our feelings arise from our thoughts about our experience
• Recognising emotions/feelings and intensity in ourselves and in others: friends, story characters…
• Naming feelings – “happy, sad, fear, anger, shame...
• Naming the intensity of feelings – vocab & awareness
• Expressing feelings
• Verbal expression of feelings - “I feel….
• Non-verbal expression of feelings - using body language, images, music...
• Matching feelings to experience – thinking about…
• Predictions how feelings may change
• Knowing about the common mistakes we often make about feelings