Are we feeling a bit red today? Maybe some of us are a touch blue, or a bit yellow. We regularly use colour to describe how we are feeling, so it makes sense to use colours when talking about emotions. For young children learning about emotions, colours can provide a metaphor to help them explain something they find difficult to put into words.
The advantage of using colour is in the nature of colour itself. When we begin to teach children about colours, we start off with primary colours, and then move on to show how they can be mixed to make the secondary colours and so on to a larger and more subtle variety. By using colour as our metaphor for emotional states, we can teach them in the same way, because every emotion boils down to a combination of emotions.
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