Shades of Meaning

Many of the words we use to express our emotions have shades of meaning. For example, someone can feel mad—or they can feel upset, angry, or furious. In this resource, children draw from a vocabulary word bank to match familiar emotions like “happy” or “sad” with synonyms that express these emotions in various levels of intensity, sorting them from least to most extreme. They then use their creativity to design four original emojis. This resource, designed for a fourth and fifth grade curriculum, helps kids as they work on determining meaning using context clues and their understanding of synonyms and antonyms.