When introducing the Emotion Works to pupils, each cog must be introduced explicitly so that the pupils have an sound understanding of what each of the cogs represents.

The Emotion Words cog is a good place to start as all of the other cogs can be hinged upon the vocabulary of the emotion words (orange cog).

For older children, it is important to expand emotional vocabulary. Creating a bank of words that the children already know for each of the different emotions gives a good baseline to build upon. In this example, children worked in groups to brainstorm as many words they knew for a given emotion word. The root emotion words in this example are are peace, sadness, scared and joy but they can be any root emotion words. Older or more emotionally literate pupils could work independently on this task to record all the words they currently know as synonyms for one Emotion Word. Once the activity has been completed, it is helpful to display the vocabulary so that it can be referred to and added to as and when new words crop up naturally during teaching and learning activities.