Emotions games and activities
for ESL kids lessons

Games and activities for teaching “Emotions & feelings” to ESL kids

Emotions / Feelings guess

After teaching emotions/feelings vocabulary (happy, sad, angry, surprised, grumpy, sleepy, etc.) have students play a guessing game. First the teacher acts out a feeling and the students try to guess what it is. The winning student gets to act out the next feeling, and so on.

Feelings and emotions lesson plan

We also have a FREE lesson plan on describing feelings and emotions which includes games and activities as well as other lesson materials.

Click to download our Feelings and emotions lesson plan.

Machine

This is good for practicing emotions and sounds. Pick one student to start. Give that student an emotion or a feeling to act out (e.g. “angry”). They must do an action and make a noise (“Grrrr!”). One at a time students can add to it and you essentially create a “machine”. This is a really fun game! (Submitted by N. Budoy)

Feelings and emotions song

We have a song available for download about describing feelings and emotions called “The feelings song“.