Feelings & Me | Year 1 PSHE Lesson | Unit 1: Me
Support little learners to name and recognise basic emotions in a calm, safe, age-appropriate way. In this engaging Year 1 lesson, children explore what feelings are, learn that all feelings are okay (and they come and go), and practise identifying happy, sad, angry, and calm through discussion, matching activities, and simple drawing tasks. Perfect for building early emotional literacy and classroom wellbeing routines.
Learning objective: Learn to recognise your basic feelings such as happy, sad, angry, and calm.
What’s included:
- Full lesson slide deck (PDF) with a clear, ready-to-teach structure: Spark Plug, Starter, Key Words, Teacher Explanation, Activities, Exit Task, and Cross-Curricular Links
- Spark Plug “What’s inside the box?” emotion guessing game using facial expressions/poses (no speaking needed)
- Starter prompts: quick whiteboard drawings for “I feel happy when… / sad when… / angry when…”
- Key vocabulary: Feeling (how you feel inside) and Calm (settled and peaceful)
- Activity 1 worksheet: cut-and-match emotions to photographs, with an optional challenge to match coping strategies too
- Activity 2 worksheet: My Feelings Wheel where children draw a time they’ve felt each emotion
- Exit task: children point to the feeling that matches how they feel right now (simple, non-verbal check-in option)
- Cross-curricular extension ideas included (reading, writing, art, maths, science, PE)
- Suggested text to support the theme: The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas
- Editable Canva template included within the resource for interactive teaching (recommended)
Why teachers love it:
- Low-prep, high-impact emotional literacy lesson with simple routines that work brilliantly in KS1
- Child-friendly and trauma-informed: normalises all feelings and supports safe, structured sharing
- Ideal for building a daily feelings check-in culture and helping children take a helpful next step once they can name an emotion
Suitable for: Year 1 / KS1
Unit: Unit 1: Me
Strand: Feelings and Emotional Agility
About The Ripple Project
The Ripple Project is more than a PSHE curriculum. It’s a mission.
A mission to help children grow into emotionally literate, self-regulated, and informed young people, with the knowledge and skills they need for personal, social, health, and economic life.
Here at RevEd, we believe children deserve more than surface-level lessons that rush through big topics. Our lessons are designed to go deeper, revisit themes over time through spiral learning, and help learners practise real-life skills in creative, practical ways that actually stick.
How the programme is organised
The Ripple Project is divided into three units that learners return to year after year:
- Me: Learners build a picture of who they are, including their interests, strengths, needs, goals, motivators, and values.
- You: Learners explore how they connect to others, including safety, healthy relationships, boundaries, diversity, tolerance, and more.
- Us: Our optional Citizenship unit helps learners connect ideas from Me and You to society and the wider world, encouraging responsibility, justice, and meaningful contribution.
A whole-school spiral curriculum
The Ripple Project spans Year 1 through to Year 11. Students revisit the same themes every year with increasing depth and complexity, so that by the time they reach bigger topics like coercive control in Year 10, they already have a strong foundation. They’ve practised essential concepts such as boundaries, healthy relationships, and consent throughout Years 1, 2, and 3 and beyond.
Every lesson is mapped to DfE statutory guidance, and we intentionally fill the gaps where essential topics are missing or not explored deeply enough.
Ultimately, our aim is to spark a ripple effect that begins with one child’s understanding, one better choice, one kinder response, and one moment of courage. Over time, those small shifts shape behaviour, actions, and values. They travel outward through friendships, families, classrooms, and communities, helping to build a fairer, safer, more compassionate wider world.
When are more resources available?
The Ripple Project is being released in a planned weekly rollout, with new lessons added each week as the programme grows. Keep coming back to see what’s new, or join our mailing list to get updates straight to your inbox. Complete packs will be added to our website as soon as they become available. For enquiries, contact Natalie at natalie@revolutionaryeducation.co.uk
Copyright & licensing
© Revolutionary Education CIC. All rights reserved.
This resource is licensed for use by the original purchaser for personal classroom or home education use only. You may download and print this resource for your own teaching, but you may not share, redistribute, upload, resell, or reproduce it in whole or in part, in any format (including digital sharing via email, messaging apps, social media, or cloud drives).
School-wide, MAT/umbrella organisation, and co-op/home education group licences are available. For licensing enquiries, please contact natalie@revolutionaryeducation.co.ukÂ
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