Games are such a great way to get children to talk about feelings.  Have you seen the episode of The Office where Michael has to complete some therapy sessions with Toby (whom he dislikes a lot)? In the episode, Michael REFUSES to talk to Toby about anything, but when Toby recommends a board game, Michael agrees, then suddenly starts opening up, then realizes that Toby has “tricked” him and is livid.  Now, I don’t try to “trick” kids into talking to me, but games and activities are certainly excellent tools to facilitate discussion.  It’s a lot more enjoyable!

I created two different documents which can be trimmed and folded into cubes, or “dice.”  One has all 6 Inside Out characters on it (Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Bing Bong) and the other has 6 prompts for discussing feelings and calming strategies.  So you would have a kiddo roll both cubes and follow the prompt for whatever Inside Out character (the corresponding feeling) they roll.  You can pick what “feeling” you want to assign Bing Bong – maybe silly, surprised, or embarrassed.

So if I roll both cubes and get “Joy” and “tell me about a time you felt ___,” then I would talk about a time I felt happy.  If I rolled “Sadness” and “Show me something you can do to calm down when you feel _____,” then I would demonstrate a calming strategy that I use when I’m sad.

If you want to use a simplified version of the activity, you could just use the Inside Out character cube and pick one prompt to use for each roll.

The character cube looks like this (printable version here):

The prompt cube looks like this (printable version here):