We hope you enjoyed our Inside Out Disney Movie Night: Emotion Sharing Guide. After our own Inside Out movie night experience, we were looking for ways to keep sharing our feelings. So we developed the snack activity you can find in our previous post plus this extended discussion guide. Please keep reading for our extended guide to sharing emotions with Disney & Pixar’s Inside Out (2015).
Inside Out Movie Night: Start the Conversation
In our original Inside Out movie guide, we walked you through creating emotion cards and sharing those emotions. You will need those cards for the following activities. Before we move on, get out those emotion cards and redistribute them to your group. Each person can use their own cards or you can mix them up so you are using cards made by others.
No emotion cards? If you need to refresh your memory or remake those cards, be sure to visit Inside Out Disney Movie Night: Emotion Sharing Guide.
Inside Out Charades
This first Inside Out movie night activity is especially for younger kids.
Have everyone place their full set of emotions cards face down in front of themselves. Now shuffle the cards without looking at them.
Each person will now take turns being the actor in a game of Inside Out Charades. One at a time, the actor should draw an emotion card and look at it without showing it to anyone else.
The actor will now act out the emotion on the card while the rest of the group, the audience, tries to guess which emotion is being portrayed. The actor should not use any sounds or words but should try to portray the emotion using facial expressions and body language alone.
Discussion Questions for Inside Out Charades
This activity is good for younger kids learning about body language and how people express emotion with their faces. It is also a good activity for unlocking the feeling emotions can bring to our bodies.
Once the actor has successfully helped the audience guess the chosen emotion, ask the actor some questions:
- What did you do to make your body show that emotion?
- Were you copying the way you have seen that emotion shown by someone else? Were you remembering feeling that emotion yourself?
- How did your body feel when you were showing us that emotion? Did you feel tense anywhere? Did you feel loose anywhere? Did you feel hot or cold?
- What ways do you understand and recognize the emotions of others?
- What are ways you can share how you are feeling?
Feeling New Emotions with Inside Out Movie Night
You have depicted Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust on your emotion cads so far. In the experience of your group, is there a particular emotion or multiple emotions missing from that list?
Ask everyone to take a blank card and represent a sixth emotion from their own life experience. As in the the original activity, they can use drawings, words, shapes or colors to show what this emotion feels like to them. Everyone should also put a name to this emotion.
Now, go around your group, and one at a time, share these new emotions. Take time to discuss what they are called, what they feel like, and what memories and experiences everyone has of these emotions.
Doing The Examen with Inside Out
Finally, we are going to borrow from the rich tradition of Ignatian Spirituality to do a final Inside Out reflection activity.
Ignatius of Loyola was a Spanish soldier who lived about five hundred years ago. After a cannonball forced him into an extended convalescence, he experienced a spiritual calling to change his path and lead a new religious order: the Society or Jesus. Today he is known, among Catholics, as Saint Igantius of Loyola, and The Society of Jesus is also known as the Jesuits. If you are a college basketball fan, you might know the Jesuits from their small but mighty basketball programs, but you might not know about their spiritual practice of praying the Examen.
You can learn more about the Examen and the Jesuits here. The Examen is a spiritual process for examining the events that have unfolded in your life and your reactions to them. Each time you do the examen, you evaluate what is drawing you closer to a good life and the person you are meant to me. You also consider what is blocking you from that life.
For Jesuits, and for many people, God is the greatest good and the Examen is a form of prayer. If you identify with that belief, we encourage you to do this activity as a kind of group prayer and discussion. If your personal spirituality or beliefs do not include a concept of God, we still invite you to try to this reflection and make it work for you. We have employed neutral language here to try to make this reflection accessible to many people.
Examining Your Day and Your Emotions with Inside Out
Seat yourself in a comfortable position and turn your mind to your body and your breathing. Let go of outside distractions. Relax and take a moment to look at your life with gratitude.
Recall specific moments from your day. Which moments brought you joy? Which moments brought you sadness? Which moments brought you fear, anger or disgust?
Reflect on how you responded to those moments and those emotions. Remember, it is not just joy that leads us to a good life. How did your emotions and the way you reacted to these moments bring you closer to the person you are meant to be? How did your reactions draw you further away from the person?
Look forward. Consider how you might use what you have learned today to live a better life? Your emotions are not bad. They are here to help you understand yourself and others better. How can you do that tomorrow?
Be kind to yourself as you move forward with a deeper understanding of who you are and who you are meant to be.
Thank you for joining us for this extended discussion and activity guide for Inside Out movie night.
Do not forget to check-out our original discussion guide: Inside Out Disney Movie Night: Emotion Sharing Guide. We also have an easy Inside Out Snack Activity in this post and other tasty snack ideas in Easy Popcorn Hacks for Family Movie Night. Thanks again for reading, and please consider subscribing to our free newsletter below.