Emotions & Feelings Sorting Mats 1 | SEL Speech Therapy Special Education

Emotions & Feelings Sorting Mats | 7 Multicultural Sorting Activities for Identifying Emotions

Help students identify, categorize, and discuss emotions with these engaging hands-on sorting mats! This set includes 7 emotion sorting mats with multicultural representation of kids — perfect for classrooms that reflect diverse learners. Students sort pictures onto the correct emotion mat, building emotional vocabulary, recognition, and classification skills.

Perfect for social emotional learning (SEL), speech therapy, special education, autism classrooms, school counseling, and early childhood settings. Great for independent workstations, language groups, small group SEL lessons, morning meetings, or 1:1 instruction.

★ Perfect for: Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), Special Education Teachers, School Counselors, Autism Classrooms, SEL Lessons, Morning Meetings, Early Childhood, PreK, Preschool, Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, Resource Rooms, and Life Skills Classrooms

7 Emotions Included:

• 😊 Sorting Happy
• 😢 Sorting Sad
• 😠 Sorting Angry
• 😲 Sorting Surprised
• 😨 Sorting Scared
• 😑 Sorting Bored
• 🤩 Sorting Excited

What's Included:

• 7 emotion sorting mats (one per emotion)
• Multicultural representation throughout
• Sorting pieces for hands-on classification
• Flexible format — differentiate by adjusting how many mats students sort at once

How to Use These Emotions Sorting Mats:

Students look at each picture and sort it onto the correct emotion mat. Perfect for:

• Independent workstations and centers
• Small group SEL lessons
• Language therapy groups (emotional vocabulary goals!)
• 1:1 instruction for targeted emotion identification
• Morning meetings and circle time
• School counseling check-ins
• Calm down corners and self-regulation practice

Built-in differentiation: To decrease difficulty, give students fewer mats (2–3 emotions at a time). To increase difficulty, give them all 7 mats to sort simultaneously. Easy to adjust to every student's level!

Great for teaching:

• Identifying emotions in others
• Emotional vocabulary (7 feeling words)
• Classification and categorization
• Visual discrimination
• Empathy and perspective taking
• Facial expression recognition
• Social emotional learning (SEL) skills
• Pragmatic language
• Following directions
• Sorting as a foundational math/language skill

★ Love these emotions activities? Check out the links below:

More Hands-On Sorting Activities

Even More Sorting Activities

For more hands-on emotions themed activities, please see the following links:

My Emotions Themed Activities