Learning to Name Feelings at the Emotional Ice Cream Shop

At The Co-op School in Brooklyn, New York, a simple game of pretend becomes a powerful tool for building emotional vocabulary—an important step in promoting self-regulation among very young children. “Emotional Ice Cream Shop” invites students to practice recognizing and learning to name feelings, while acting them out in a playful way.

Here’s how it works: One child selects an emotion—silly, sad, or angry, for example—and acts out that emotion while ordering ice cream at the shop. The shopkeeper, often the teacher, mirrors the emotion back while the rest of the class observes. As pre-K teacher Holly Van Duyne, who uses the game in her class of 3- and 4-year olds, explains, “We play Emotional Ice Cream Shop to facilitate students learning different emotions and how to express them to themselves and their peers.”

Some students jump right in with expressive acting, while others need more direction. Van Duyne adapts the game so that younger children feel supported, while some students stretch their vocabulary with more nuanced feelings like frustration or disappointment. Van Duyne will often help children choose from several options, and she models what those feelings look and sound like. This makes the game accessible to all students, no matter their starting point.

By embodying emotions through play, students begin to recognize and verbalize them with greater accuracy. As Van Duyne notes, “There can be a lot that they’re not able to express, and emotions can present as different things. So having the language can help them verbalize more descriptively how they’re feeling.”

The game brings out lots of laughter and dramatic performances while the students are learning, and gives the teacher a chance to let students see another side of them. “I think it helps me be a little bit more silly,” Van Duyne says. “And having games like Emotional Ice Cream Shop in my back pocket are really helpful in order to hold the group’s attention.”

In the pretend ice cream shop, students are not only expanding their emotional vocabulary as they learn how to name feelings, but also practicing empathy, self-expression, and connection—skills they’ll carry far beyond preschool and kindergarten.

To learn more about games that support learning, build classroom community, and develop social and emotional skills for students, check out the many articles that Child’s Play NY founder Jocelyn Greene has written for Edutopia.