5 Simple Art Exercises to Help Children Manage Big Emotions
You don't need an art room, special paper or any artistic skill to use these. Each exercise takes 10–20 minutes, works at home or in class, and has one goal: helping a child move a feeling from inside to on the page.
1. The Feelings Weather Report
Ask: "If your feelings today were weather, what would the forecast be?" Sunny with a chance of storms? Fog that won't lift? Children draw their forecast, then — if they want — explain it.
Why it works: weather is a brilliant metaphor because it's blame-free. Nobody is "bad" for having a thunderstorm day, and every storm passes.
2. The Worry Monster
Draw the worry as a creature. Give it a name, a silly hat, three weaknesses. Some children like to fold the paper up tight and post it into a "worry box" at the end.
Why it works: externalising a worry shrinks it. A fear you can doodle a moustache on is a fear you're already bigger than.
3. Colour Your Volume
Draw a simple outline of a person (a gingerbread shape is fine). Ask the child to colour where they feel their feelings: red buzzing in fists, blue heaviness in the tummy, yellow fizz behind the eyes.
Why it works: it builds body awareness — the first step of self-regulation is noticing where a feeling lives before it takes over.
4. The Two-Handed Scribble
Put on one song. Both hands get a crayon each. Scribble until the song ends — no picture required, no lifting allowed. Then look together: "What do you see hiding in there?" Outline any shapes you find.
Why it works: bilateral scribbling is wonderfully regulating, and "finding" images afterwards turns chaos into meaning — which is exactly the journey we want feelings to take.
5. The Kindness Comic
Fold a page into four panels. Panel 1: something unkind that happened (real or invented). Panels 2–4: three different endings — what a friend could do, what a grown-up could do, what I could do.
Why it works: children rehearse responses to hard moments in a safe, fictional space. We use this constantly in our anti-bullying workshops.
A gentle rule for all five: never force the talking. The page has already done its job even if the child says nothing at all. And if a child's artwork regularly shows themes that worry you, that's a signal to loop in a school counsellor or professional art therapist.
Try these at home and send us the results — some of our favourite HeARTfolios started exactly this way.