Molesworth Street Kindergarten

From Audrey, Rachel, Amy and Sakoon, Early Childhood teachers

Exploring Feelings Through Music and Colours

This term, the Rosella group children explored emotions through music, movement, colours, sensory play, and group discussions. Building on our Term 1 learning about facial expressions, the children began discovering that feelings can also be expressed through movement, sounds, colours, and art.

Children listened to a variety of music including calm, loud, soft, scary, fast-beat, and slow-beat music while using colourful scarves to move freely and respond to the rhythm and mood. Some children waved and shook their scarves quickly to energetic music, while others gently swayed and twirled during calm songs. Through movement, the children explored how music can influence emotions and body movements.

The children then expressed their feelings through drawing and mark-making. Calm music inspired soft curly lines and spirals, while scary music encouraged sharp zigzag lines and strong strokes. During this experience, children also began connecting emotions with colours. The children shared, “I feel blue,” “I feel green” while listening to nature sounds.

Inspired by The Colour Monster, the children used coloured water, droppers, and cotton pads to create “feeling maps.” This experience supported fine motor development, creativity, and emotional expression. Children carefully squeezed coloured water onto cotton pads to represent different emotions. Yellow represented happiness, blue represented sadness, red showed anger, and green reflected calm feelings. Some children chose purple for confusion and white for silly or bored feelings. Others mixed colours together to show that emotions can sometimes feel complicated or happen at the same time.

We also welcomed Cookie the puppet, who came to the room feeling confused. Cookie shared different social situations with the children, such as “My friend snatched the toy without asking.” The children listened carefully, discussed how Cookie might feel, and helped him sort his emotions into matching feeling jars using coloured cotton pads. Through these conversations, the children demonstrated empathy, emotional awareness, and problem-solving skills while learning how to support others.

These experiences supported Molesworth Street Kindergarten children’s growing emotional vocabulary, creativity, social connections, and understanding that everyone experiences many different feelings in different ways.