Reflecting on one’s emotions to learn to understand them: an educative research in primary school

Abstract

In a time characterized by emotional illiteracy, schools need tools and methods to promote the development of emotional competences in children. This essay presents a project of emotional education, designed to help primary school children reflect on their own emotions in order to understand them. Emotional self-understanding has been promoted through diary writing, accompanied by the metaphor of the “garden of emotions”, aimed at facilitating the analysis of emotional experiences. The results of a qualitative research work carried out on the project suggest that, at the end of this process, the children involved have learned to define the emotions they felt, thus showing to have acquired important emotional literacy skills.