Love for Kimochis®

Kimochis are great because they get children to talk about their more ‘negative’ feelings with other kids and with teachers and parents. Here is a vehicle for coaching children about feelings, which is the royal road to these magic moments for connecting with our children.

Kimochis help to encourage an active concrete discussion about our abstract emotional reactions. We enjoy incorporating them into our daily treatment lessons. They are helpful in encouraging students to better recognize and articulate their own emotional responses as well as to increase their sensitivity to emotions of others.

I was up at Reynolds Middle School as their substitute admin and the SBC teacher there has been using the feeling pillows with his students. One of his kids got up and left the classroom without permission and when the teacher was able to catch up with him he asked him to pick out the feelings that he was having before he left the room. He picked up-

Left out
Sensitive
Cranky

Giving kids a way to communicate their feelings non-verbally and tangibly is so cool! The feeling pillows then helped facilitate a conversation- he never would have known the kid felt “left out” if it were not for the feeling pillows.

Kimochis has created such a wonderful climate in our classrooms as it is the foundation for all our communication.  Kimochis is not just a curriculum for us but a way of living and being.

“Santa” brought Alexander Kimochis a couple of years ago after we visited a friend who had the books, feeling discs and character dolls — he instantly loved them and I was amazed at how quickly and effortlessly feelings conversations arose so I knew we needed these.

I used ours only occasionally at first, sometimes just playfully playing a sort of guess-the-feeling charades game, or when all my Carolyn tools (eg can I help you write a letter about your feelings?) and other parenting strategies failed when emotions ran very high. He allowed me to guess his upset feeling by handing him a Kimochi– if I got it wrong he would throw it down (or at me!). If right, he’d keep it and nod — this helped him move from MAD and FRUSTRATED, to SAD to LEFT OUT and HURT (the real unprocessed feelings under the anger). And eventually, to HAPPY or LOVE — in the same session. I was/am floored every time watching this progression. He was accessing, naming and actually processing his big emotions in real time right before my eyes.

This eventually evolved into a nightly ritual (that we both love) of him choosing which Kimochis represent his current feelings, and I now write them down along with an explanation in a special journal we created for this (the journal and writing were his suggestion). His dad is now doing this at his place, too, which means this boy is proactively accessing and processing his feelings every night. A miracle.

He’s become so emotionally literate and aware — a total transformation. We had to buy more blank ones bc he loves creating new ones as he feels them (most recently: empathy, shame, active). The healing that these bring after tough moments or events is miraculous.

All this to say, we’ve become big fans of this tool in our family.