One Hand Wonder - Activity Instructions

Tune In

Take a ‘picture walk’ through ‘Little Miss Jessica Goes to School’ particularly looking at Jessica’s facial expressions. Encourage children to think about how Jessica might be feeling and invite empathy and compassion for others. For example:

How is Jessica looking in this picture as she runs out the door, ready for school? (Excited, happy)
How do you think she feels here, when her mum is tying her shoelaces? What is she doing with her eyes? What is her mouth doing?
How is she feeling when she runs out of the classroom? How do you know?

Find Out

Ask children to ‘show’ how they might feel in different scenarios and practice naming emotions.

Have the children sit or stand in a circle so they can see each other’s faces. Give the children a scenario and ask them to use their bodies and their faces to show how they would be feeling. Scenarios can be altered to suit specific demographics or dynamics of your group, but some examples could be:

How would you feel if you just saw your best friend arriving at kinder? (excited)
How would you feel if you lost your favourite toy? (sad)
How would you feel if you couldn’t find your family while you were at the shops? (scared)
How would you feel if you just fell over and really hurt your knee? (hurt, sad, scared)
How would you feel if you just did something for the first time, that you had been practicing for a long time? (proud)

/icon Doing this activity in a circle lets children see how this looks for other people as well as think about how their bodies and faces change with different emotions.

Take Action

Feeling happy, excited and proud can make us feel pretty good. But feeling sad or frustrated isn’t fun. Let’s practice feeling frustrated and how we can manage that. In the book, Jessica wanted to rush out the door, but she needed her shoelaces tied. Do you think you could tie your shoelaces with just one hand? Even getting your shoes on with one hand can be tricky!

Let’s have a go at doing something that is trickier when we only use one hand. We’ll need a good way to remind children which hand they aren’t using. For some children, you could pop a sticker on the back of their non-dominant hand so they know not to use that one. For other children, it might be easier to pop a sock over their hand so they remember not to use it.

If you have a child with one hand in your class, you could either let them take a leadership role and demonstrate how they have figured out how to problem-solve with one hand, or you could change something else, like letting them try the activity with a blindfold on. As the child’s educator, we’ll leave it to you to understand the situation and make that choice.

Once the one-hand rule is established, introduce children to the fine motor activity. Some suggestions include:

lego building
threading cards or beads
playdough
gluing to make collages
eating with a knife and fork.

Engage in a conversation with the children, with links to Jessica in the story:

How do you feel when you are trying to do this activity? (Children may need assistance naming emotions such as frustration, annoyance, embarrassment, or maybe even pride when they have achieved something despite the added challenge)
That looks tricky! Let’s pause and think, is there another way we could do this? (Children may need an additional tool, they may need to ask for help, or they may need to work with a peer to get the job done) It looks like (peer) is having a tricky time. Is there something we could do to help them? How do we offer to help them? (Some children will want to jump in and help the way they think it should be done. This is an opportunity to practice good ways to offer help and what to do when people don’t want that help too).
Ok, time’s up! You aren’t finished? But this is how long we normally have! How do you feel right now? (It might not feel fair, or they might feel stressed because they didn’t get time to finish. This gives an opportunity to talk about how sometimes, we just need a little bit of patience because different things take different amounts of time for different people.)

This activity is designed to help children sit in the ‘yellow zone’ of emotional regulation and practice managing and reframing frustration and annoyance. If children start to escalate into the ‘red zone’ and get sad or angry, use other strategies like deep breathing, counting to 10, or stepping away for some reset time.

One Hand Wonder

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