Appropriate the lexicon of emotions

Session 1: Retelling the story

Have students watch the short film. After this first viewing, ask them to identify the characters (a girl and her father) and to tell the story in their own words. Generally, children naturally recount how the story unfolds, step by step. If not, guide them to summarize the plot chronologically.

• The little girl is celebrating her sixth birthday. Her shoemaker dad gives her astronaut boots. Together, they play at traveling in space.
• She grows up and goes to university, determined to become an astronaut. She works hard but gets bad grades.
• The more time passes, the more she becomes withdrawn. She no longer sees what her father is trying to do to encourage her.
• She applies for the astronaut training program. The answer is negative.
• One day she comes home and her father is not there. He died.
• She smashes everything in her room and gives up on her dream.
• While tidying up, she comes across a box in which her father kept his shoes. She finds her pair of boots and, with them, the motivation to believe in her dream again.
• She works hard, gets good grades and graduates from university.
• She is admitted to the astronaut training program. She realizes her dream and travels into space.

Ask the children what they felt during this first viewing. It is a very moving film with a child as its heroine, which allows students to easily identify with the character.

Session 2: Identify the character's emotions

Go over the main stages of the story with the students (see session 1). Have the students watch the film a second time, with instructions to pay particular attention to the emotions experienced by the girl throughout the story.

Gather the emotions the students have identified (on a poster for example). Ask them to contextualize, using questions: At what point in the story does the character feel this emotion? Why? How did you identify it? It is likely that students cite the same emotion several times to designate different images. The best-known primary emotions will be cited: joy, anger, sadness, surprise, fear. Students will refer to facial expressions (shape of the eyes, eyebrows, mouth) or body movements (jumping, running, laughing, etc.).

Ask the students to observe a series of images from the film and sort them into 5 groups which reflect the primary emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise. The teacher will have prepared 5 posters on which images of related emotions will be pasted. N.B.: Depending on the age of the students, we can adapt the number of images/emotions studied. Once this sorting has been carried out, point out to the students that there are nuances of intensity between the emotions

grouped together on the same poster (e.g. enthusiasm / joy / euphoria). At this point, the students can mime the emotions. Based on this observation, ask the students to find more precise names of emotions to caption each image. Specify that the same name cannot be used several times. This therefore leads to expanding the lexicon with less used terms: disappointment, discouragement, etc. At the end of the activity, the teacher provides (or has people guess from known words or expressions) the lexicon corresponding to the images which could not be captioned.

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Session 3: Appropriate the lexicon of emotions

Beforehand, the teacher will have created a set of dominoes with the images from the film and the names of the emotions. Prepare one set for every 6 students. Invite the students to play a game of dominoes. We can also offer them the opportunity to play at other times of the week, by leaving the games freely accessible in the class.

Written record: Hand out to the students a sheet of images from the film grouped by type of emotion. Ask them to caption the images with the names of the emotions studied. Depending on the age and level of the students, we can provide a series of labels containing the names of the emotions.

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