Participant 4:  The music made me feel fluid

Participant 4: At the start I felt not good, but by the end I felt good.

Participant 5: I’m not really social – a lot, and being active kind of helped with that.

Pic 1: Students started to use colour to express emotions. It was interesting that pink was chosen for ‘happy’ and we discussed this, exploring the idea that not all colours had the same effect on everyone.

Pic 2: One student used storyboarding to try and explain how the workshop changed and how he felt different at different stages.

Pic 3: One student was more abstract in the way she drew and explored colours and shapes to communicate how she felt at different stages of the workshop.

2. Researchers used a limited vocabulary when initially discussing their feelings.

3. There was a sense that children were trying to be positive about the workshops rather than critical about their feelings and responses; students wanted to please/say the right thing and be positive about the provision, and this behaviour may prevent discussing any emotions or responses which are not fully positive; children’s desire for “getting it right” and the need to please an adult may become a barrier for children to fully explore emotions (Leigh, 2020 p. 134)

4. Some students created a narrative about their experience and wanted to use storyboarding, dividing the session up into sections and thinking about each part of the workshop separately.

5. Children felt differently about colours and we explored how colours can encourage or represent different emotions in different people. Similar to research carried out by Burkitt and Sheppard on children’s use of colour to explore mixed emotions, “children’s colour preferences influenced the specific colours they chose to differentially depict neutral, happy and sad and drawings of mixed valence” (Burkitt & Sheppard,2014 p. 246).