Back to School Emotions Sorting Mats | SEL Speech Therapy SPED Autism

Back to School Emotions Sorting Mats | 8 Emotion Mats with Back-to-School Visuals

This back-to-school emotions sorting set teaches students to identify and sort emotions through engaging back-to-school visuals. The set includes 8 unique sorting mats — one for each of the following emotions: Happy, Sad, Excited, Surprised, Angry, Tired, Worried, and Scared. Each mat features back-to-school imagery including backpacks, paper, glue, erasers, pencils, markers, crayons, and books.

Perfect for SEL lessons, speech therapy, special education, and counseling support during the school year transition.

★ Perfect for: Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), Special Education Teachers, School Counselors, Autism Classrooms, SEL Lessons, Self-Contained Classrooms, Resource Rooms, Paraprofessionals, ABA Therapists, Early Childhood, PreK, Preschool, Kindergarten, 1st Grade, and 2nd Grade

8 Emotion Sorting Mats Included:

• 😊 Sorting Happy
• 😢 Sorting Sad
• 🤩 Sorting Excited
• 😲 Sorting Surprised
• 😠 Sorting Angry
• 😴 Sorting Tired
• 😟 Sorting Worried
• 😨 Sorting Scared

Back-to-School Visuals Throughout:

Backpacks, paper, glue, eraser, pencil, marker, crayons, and books — familiar school supplies that students encounter at the start of the school year.

Skills Targeted:

• Identifying emotions (8 different feelings)
• Emotional vocabulary
• Social emotional learning (SEL)
• Classification and categorization
• Visual discrimination
• Empathy and perspective taking
• Back-to-school emotional regulation
• Receptive and expressive language
• Following directions
• Independent work skills

How to Use These Emotions Sorting Mats:

Students look at each picture and sort it onto the correct emotion mat. Use in:

• Independent workstations and centers
• Small group SEL lessons
• Language therapy groups
• 1:1 instruction
• Counseling check-ins (especially first-week-of-school feelings)
• Morning meetings
• Back-to-school orientation activities
• First-day-of-school emotional discussions

Built-in differentiation: To decrease difficulty, give students fewer mats (2-3 emotions at a time). To increase difficulty, give them all 8 mats to sort simultaneously.

If your students enjoy these activities, there are many more sorting activities in my collection, you can find some of them at the links below:

More Hands-On Sorting Activities

Even More Sorting Activities

For more back to school themed activities, please see the link below:

More Back to School Activities