‘I Love You, Blue Kangaroo’ is a lovely story to help explore a range of feelings and emotion words, as demonstrated by this orange cog activity with a lower primary nurture group.

We loved this idea of using an emotion word spy glass to help younger learners search in picture books for feeling and emotion words. It was inspired by the idea of using our ‘coggles’ to look for the different aspects of emotional learning in stories and other texts, but it makes the idea so much simpler by focusing on any content relating to a single aspect, or ‘cog’, at a time.

We have to credit the idea to Fiona Lang, Nurture Teacher at Meldrum Primary School in West Lothian, and we’re fairly sure you’ll get the gist of how she used the orange cog magnifying glass with her group by looking at this photograph.

We’ve now shared and extended the idea of the cog spy glasses or ‘lollypops’ more widely and they’re getting a big thumbs up from people working at the ‘understanding cog concepts’ and ‘making simple links’ level. If you’re working with a similar group we’d suggest you get crafty with the DIY cog card sheets, a laminator,  scissors and a set of coloured lolly pop sticks!

If necessary you could introduce the idea by using the orange/green/red spy glass to look for orange/green/red things in the room/in a storybook etc. This would also be a way to include younger or less able children in a mixed learning group.

As you introduce the cog concepts you would then change the focus to linking up the colours with the emotion cog concepts and trying to spot, for example, a happy girl, … a smile, …flushed cheeks etc…