Elephant-Sized Emotions
GRAPHIC DESIGN
This activity book was developed to help students understand what they are feeling and how to safely and creatively express themselves. The book was meant to teach students the benefits of expressing both positive and negative emotions such as anger, happiness, stress, calm, lonely, loved, insecure, confidence, bored, and creativity, and understand why those feelings are occurring.
This project was produced with the Who’s Frank club and students in St. Thomas’ grade five class.
We began this project by first completing an audience analysis by going to the St. Thomas grade five students to understand what emotions were most prevalent in their lives and what methods they have used so far that have been successful in releasing pent-up emotions. We took the most frequently mentioned methods as well as some of the methods we had researched for each emotion category and created a list. We went back to St. Thomas to get the students to draw images of what they thought each emotion would look like in real life. Items like thunderstorms, X’s, and alarm clocks were some of the items drawn for the emotion ‘anger.’ We collected all the images one week later and placed them on the title pages of each section in the book. We wanted the St. Thomas students to feel like they had really contributed to this book, and create a familiarity with using the methods inside.