¡Buenos días! ¿Cómo estás? Teaching Feelings Routine

One of the most important routines I have in my classroom is my greeting. Everyday one of the first things I do is say ¡Buenos días clase! (Good morning class!) and the class says back ¡Buenos días! ¿Cómo estás? (Good morning, how are you?) I then use my response to lead into my lesson. Normally I say Estoy muy bien (I am very good) and the class says ¿por qué? (why?) and I go into the schedule of the day, Hoy vamos a ... (I then use verbs in the infinitive form, i.e. hablar, cantar, jugar, etc.) Sometimes I say that I feel bad and say the reason is because I need them to do x, or y. I play around with it, especially in the older grades so that the routine stays the same with some variation. 

No routine comes without an explicit lesson. This week I have been working with my Pre-K students on building up to this routine. Several lessons are completely dedicated to teaching ¿Cómo estás? and 3-4 responses. I used to only teach three responses but after introducing the first three feelings I realized they could handle more. I gave students the chance to show their feelings every day using a couple of different worksheets. Here is one example from one of my Pre K 4 students Sylvia:

I used puppets in this lesson as well, having each puppet feel a different emotion. I also found this video (though a little strange) very helpful at remembering the routine:

I really like these Learning Time Fun videos that focus on one feeling at a time. They have short videos on these feelings: Feliz, Enojado, Tender Sed, Enferma, Tener Frio.

I used music from Ana Lomba's Hop, Skip and Sing Spanish as background music while students worked on their sheets.

Another fun activity is to hold up feeling cards that have the different emotion face on them and then ask the students to show that emotion and saying the feeling word. 

Here are the books that I also have found helpful:

• La Catrina: Emotions – Emociones

• How Are You? / ¿Cómo estás? 

• Yo me pregunto… Las emociones 

• Así me siento yo

One station that my kids always have fun playing is this expression matching game. Where students are able to match up the card's expression to the face on the blocks. Students have to say ¿Cómo estás? before drawing a card. Then they try to say how the face is feeling as they draw the card.