4. An introduction to the Orange Cog

Posted May 3, 2020 by Claire Murray

An introduction to the Orange Cog

Learning and talking about the orange Emotion Words cog helps increase the number of words we know to name our feelings. The bigger our vocabulary for emotion words, the easier we find it to talk about the different emotional events and experiences that happen in our lives.

At school, at home, with teachers, with our family and friends… emotion words help us say how we feel and help others to understand us better.

Take a look at the video below to remind you of some of the #orangecog resources and activities we use to help you learn and talk about lots of different emotion words at school.

At school we use the orange cog to focus our attention on learning emotion words through all kinds of lessons and activities across the curriculum, and we also encourage teachers and pupils to talk about and name the emotions that crop up in real life during the school day too.

Some questions…

Which orange cog resources do you recognise from your classroom or around your school?
Can you remember some lessons or assemblies about the orange Emotion Words cog that you can talk about at home?
Stop and start the video to help you find examples of at least 10 emotion word symbols or written words shown in the video.
Talk to a parent or someone else in your family about what some of the words in the video mean.

What’s next with the Orange Cog?

I’ve been thinking about how you can keep on top of learning about Emotion Words at home. Over the next few posts I’m going to share some examples and activity ideas that will be helpful, but let’s first of all make sure you know how to define the Orange Cog.

Starter activity: defining the Orange Cog

Have a look at the slideshow below and follow the steps to make a cog-shaped reminder about what the orange cog represents.

If you haven’t yet made a cog template you can follow this link to find out how: Make your own Emotion Works Cog Template

Good idea!! We decided to start a jotter to keep my son’s Emotion Works home learning tasks in one place. This one was his RME jotter sent home from school at the end of last year and it still had lots of blank pages in it. We just tore out the RME pages from the front and turned it into an Emotion Works jotter instead!