A small group of Hawaii Island classrooms spent a term beginning the day the same way: each child chooses a Feeling Face and places it where the teacher can see it.

Ninety Seconds A Morning

The routine takes about a minute and a half. Teachers described it as the most useful ninety seconds of the day, because it turns a guess about a child's mood into something visible.

Catching The Hard Days Early

Several teachers noted the same thing: the difficult mornings were now visible at nine o'clock rather than at eleven, when a feeling had already become an incident.

The Vocabulary Follows

By the end of the term, children who had started by pointing were using the words themselves - frustrated, left out, nervous - with far more precision than "good" and "bad".

What The Children Said

Asked what they liked about it, one child answered for most of them: "You don't have to explain it first."