World Emoji Day: Exploring Feelings, Communication, Stories, and Creativity Through Play
Emojis are already part of children's everyday world. They appear in messages, games, stories, and digital spaces—small pictures that can communicate a feeling, an idea, or a reaction without using words.
World Emoji Day is a lovely opportunity to bring this familiar form of communication into playful learning. Instead of teaching children what each emoji is “supposed” to mean, we can invite them to look, wonder, interpret, move, create, and share.
Because communication doesn't always begin with words.
Sometimes it begins with a face, a color, a gesture, or a tiny symbol.
Exploring Emojis and Feelings
Place a small collection of emoji cards where children can explore them freely.
Invite them to choose an emoji that reminds them of a feeling, a moment, or even a character from a story.
You might ask:
“Which one would you choose today?”
There doesn't need to be one correct answer. A child might see the same emoji differently from someone else—and that is part of the conversation.
Why it works:
Builds emotional vocabulary
Encourages self-expression
Supports social-emotional learning
Shows children that feelings can be communicated in many ways
Try this: Invite children to create their own emoji for a feeling that doesn't already have a symbol.
Emoji Stories
Emojis can become the beginning of a story.
Place three or four emoji cards together and ask:
“What could be happening here?”
Children can arrange the cards, point to them, act them out, or tell a story inspired by the sequence.
There doesn't have to be one “right” story. A 😊 followed by a 🌧️ and a 🐸 could become anything a child imagines.
Why it works:
Encourages storytelling
Develops oral language
Supports sequencing and creative thinking
Gives children a visual starting point for communication
Emojis and Read-Alouds
Books about feelings, friendship, facial expressions, and communication pair beautifully with World Emoji Day.
Choose a picture book with expressive characters and invite children to think about how the characters might be feeling as the story unfolds.
Pause during the story and ask:
“Which emoji matches this character right now?”
After reading, children can choose emojis to retell the story, show how a character's feelings changed, or create a new ending.
Read-Aloud Books for World Emoji Day
The Color Monster by Anna Llenas — A wonderful introduction to emotions through colors and a perfect book for connecting feelings with visual symbols.
In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek — A gentle exploration of emotions that gives children language for talking about what they feel.
The Way I Feel by Janan Cain — A playful rhyming book that explores a wide range of emotions and encourages children to recognize and express feelings.
Glad Monster, Sad Monster by Ed Emberley and Anne Miranda — Colorful monster characters and expressive faces make this a natural bridge between emotions and emoji play.
Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day by Jamie Lee Curtis — A lively exploration of changing moods that helps children notice how feelings can shift throughout the day.
After reading, invite children to match emojis to characters, create an emoji retelling, act out different feelings, or design an emoji for their favorite character.
Move Like an Emoji
Take emojis off the page and bring them into the body.
Choose a few expressive faces and invite children to act them out.
How would a surprised emoji move?
How would a sleepy emoji walk?
How would an excited emoji jump?
Children can use their faces, voices, and whole bodies to explore different expressions.
Why it works:
Encourages movement and body awareness
Connects facial expressions with feelings
Supports dramatic play
Makes emotional learning active and playful
Create Your Own Emojis
What would an emoji designed by a child look like?
Give children paper, crayons, paint, or loose parts and invite them to invent their own symbols.
They might create:
A new feeling
A favorite activity
A weather emoji
An animal emoji
An emoji for a favorite food
An emoji for a character from a favorite book
Encourage them to explain what their symbol means—or simply let the picture speak for itself.
Why it works:
Encourages creativity
Develops visual communication
Supports fine motor skills
Gives children ownership over meaning
One Symbol, Many Meanings
Emojis can also open a gentle conversation about perspective and communication.
Ask two children what they think the same emoji means.
Their answers may be completely different.
That's okay.
A symbol doesn't always communicate exactly the same thing to everyone. Meaning can depend on context, experience, culture, and personal interpretation.
For young children, this is a simple way to begin exploring the idea that other people may see and feel things differently from us.
Creative Extensions
Emoji Matching: Match emojis to feelings, characters, or situations.
Emoji Charades: Choose an emoji and act it out without words.
Emoji Art: Create a picture using emoji-inspired symbols.
Emoji Memory: Make pairs of matching or related emojis.
Emoji Story Cards: Use a small collection of emojis to invent an open-ended story.
Emoji Puppet Play: Give characters different emoji faces and create a story.
Emoji Journal: Choose one emoji to represent something from the day.
Emoji Nature Hunt: Find real-world objects that remind children of different emojis.
Bringing It All Together
World Emoji Day is more than a celebration of little digital symbols. It is an opportunity to explore how children communicate through faces, pictures, movement, stories, and symbols.
Emojis can become a starting point for conversations about feelings, a prompt for storytelling, a dramatic play invitation, or a playful extension of a favorite book.
There doesn't need to be a worksheet or a finished product.
Sometimes all you need is a small basket of emoji cards, a good picture book, a few curious children, and the question:
“What do you think this means?”
From there, the possibilities are endless.
Because before children learn to explain everything with words, they are already looking, pointing, expressing, imagining, and making meaning.
And sometimes, one tiny emoji can hold a very big story. 😊
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