Join the Feel Good Friends on a journey to understand emotions! Match emoji faces with their feelings, progress through levels, and take mindful breathing breaks. This game helps kids recognize, name, and celebrate all kinds of feelings in a fun, supportive way.
Category: Social & Emotional Learning. Recommended ages: 5-12.
Players match emoji faces to feeling words, progressing through increasingly challenging levels. After each level, enjoy a calming breathing exercise before continuing. Encouraging messages and a friendly UI make learning about emotions fun and positive!
Feel Good Friends Match has children match emoji faces to feeling words, with a breathing exercise between levels. Structurally it is a matching game; its content is emotional vocabulary, and that combination is deliberate. A child who has words for what they feel can tell you about it instead of acting it out, and expanding that vocabulary is one of the most useful things you can do for a five to twelve year old.
Recognition comes before regulation and cannot be skipped. A child has to notice and name frustration before they can do anything about it, and naming is the step usually left out of conversations about behaviour. The game works on exactly that step, pairing a face with a word often enough that the word becomes available when it is needed.
The breathing exercise between levels is not filler. It hands the learner a concrete, portable technique, practised while they are calm — which is the only time a regulation skill can actually be learned. Trying to teach breathing to a child mid-meltdown does not work, because they need it already familiar. Repeated practice in a low-stakes setting is what makes it available later.
The limitation to be aware of is that emoji faces are simplified and exaggerated, and real faces are neither. A child can get good at reading cartoon expressions while still misreading a subtle one. Bridge that gap directly: while reading a book or watching something together, pause and ask what a character is feeling and what in their face or posture shows it. Real faces are the harder and more important skill.
Offline, name emotions more precisely in ordinary conversation — not only happy, sad and angry, but disappointed, nervous, relieved, embarrassed, frustrated. Model it aloud yourself: "I am frustrated because I cannot find my keys." Children who hear adults name feelings calmly learn that feelings are discussable rather than dangerous. Asking about characters in stories is an easier starting point than asking about themselves.
Signs of growth: naming a feeling instead of only showing it, using more specific words over time, noticing and commenting on other people's feelings, and reaching for the breathing unprompted when upset. That last one is the whole purpose of the game, and it usually appears well after the matching has become easy.