Learning About Our Emotions: Inside and Out

I will be honest in telling you that I didn't see this movie until right before school started. One of my students absolutely LOVES Disney and Pixar movies, so I made it a point to see it so I could bond with my students over the movie.

But I had this brilliant idea that I needed to have an Inside Out bulletin board. The rest of my classroom is color coded with primary colors (and perfectly matches the movie characters... and not on purpose) and I've already started to incorporate the characters in the classroom.

I bought these Inside Out Itty Bitty's at Hallmark over summer. My kids love them and they are GREAT for when we read the story in class. It helps my students visually to see the characters, and they love when I hold them up to use them to "talk out their parts." I plan on putting them in a basket as a "cool down basket" for when students are a little more emotional than usual, and hopefully it will get them talking about their emotions.

So when I had this idea to start bringing more of Inside Out into my classroom, I knew a bulletin board was a must.

Let me be honest again and tell you how much I love hate making bulletin boards. I love the idea of bulletin boards, but all of the time it takes to make a good one just isn't my thing. Last year, I did one to count down the 100 days of school... and it stayed up until the very last day of school. Yeah, I'm that teacher.

So I got on Pinterest (because, you know, everything is on Pinterest!)... but I didn't find anything. Nothing! I know, that's a first, right!? But I did find inspiration in the form of this movie poster:

As soon as I saw it, I knew that's what I wanted to do. I knew Riley had to be included and I somehow needed to incorporate each emotion to represent them as parts that make up Riley.

Enter my finished bulletin board:

Bulletin Board Paper:
I used regular bulletin board paper and just measured it out so that the strips would be even.

Character Clip Art:
I purchased movie clip art online. Each character took up one full page and Riley was 4 pages wide by 3 pages tall (I printed her poster size). I created the memory orbs. You can grab them free here.

Borders:
The yellow border is from Creative Teaching Press. You can order it here. It's called Painted Palette Ombre Yellow Scallops. The blue border is just a sparkley blue border from Lakeshore Learning. I chose sparkley because of how the emotions glow in the movie.

Emotion Synonym Cards:
I created these myself. You can grab them for free here.

Have you been using Inside Out in your classroom to talk about Emotions?