Kimberly Olson

Teaching, to me, is all about connections—connections to students, to standards, to school initiatives, and to the community. Making meaningful connections for students ensures engagement and, hopefully, contributes to curiosity and learning for life.

When my district adopted Leah Kuypersʼ The Zones of Regulation curriculum (see Resources), which instructs students how to identify and regulate their emotions in order to be learning-ready, I knew it was a perfect platform to pair with a portrait lesson I was developing.

What Are the Zones?
The Zones empowers students by teaching them to identify and then shift, maintain, or control their emotions to be in the right emotional state to learn. Through color-coded zones, students learn how to name their feelings and gain strategies in moving themselves, or others, to the regulated green zone in order to learn. I use this common language to introduce kindergarten students to portraiture.

Calmness in Expression
My project Reading Faces is a collaboration between learning the strategic elements of portraiture and the social responsibility of supporting each other during happy, sad, or angry times, raising student agency in helping peers regulate their moods and actions. Paired with New Hampshire’s 5 Signs (see Resources), this experience will lead students to notice and address warning signs before they escalate into negative situations.

Reading Faces is a collaboration between learning the strategic elements of portraiture and the social responsibility of supporting each other during happy, sad, or angry times.

Students apply important connections, especially through self- and social awareness, by identifying, depicting, and responding to the emotions exhibited on their classmates’ faces. Identifying the parts of the face that change as emotions do informs how students draw each of the zones. Students also share ideas about what to do and say when others are in the blue zone, as well as coping and calming strategies for the red and yellow zones.

Embracing Joy
I share a variety of portraits spanning cultures, geographies, time periods, and genders and lead a discussion that prompts students’ recognition of basic shapes, tying in math standards. (For example, an oval for the head, ovals and circles for the eyes, and conversations about symmetry and proportion.)

A portrait checklist (a visual reminder of what to include, forehead to chin) helps young artists remember each element. Students brainstorm and identify the parts of the face that change with a person’s feelings: the eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and sometimes the nose. They love to practice making faces to express each zone to preview their challenge. The yellow zone always results in expressions that resemble Kevin in the Home Alone aftershave scene, which makes students giggle every time.

Another connection, this time to ELA standards, occurs by sharing Norman Juster’s Sourpuss and Sweetiepie (Scholastic, 2008), with its relatable storyline, and Chris Raschka’s emotion-filled illustrations, which overdramatize the changing expressions of a relatable main character.

Showing Grace through Drawing
Students create two sketchbook drawings of a classmate. One student poses while the other draws, focusing on changes from the green (“sweetiepie”) and red (“sourpuss”) zones.

In the next class, the collaborative aspect is reinforced as students decide who draws first and which zone expression to include in a full-page portrait. Students gain skills in showing grace and holding judgments as they witness their partners’ visual interpretation of them, offering a worthy exercise in restraint as I remind students that we are all doing our best.

As students prepare to add color, I take the opportunity to talk about skin tones as a wide range of shades, mostly variations of brown. I have used Karen Katz’s The Colors of Us (Square Fish, 2002) for years, finding it a realistic and unbiased, celebratory overview of all the beautiful colors of skin. More recently, I added The Skin You Live In by Michael Tyler (Chicago Childrenʼs Museum, 2005) and shared the fascinating work of Angélica Dass’ The Colors We Share (Aperture, 2021), normalizing the variations of skin color across the class population.

Students demonstrate overlapping skills in observation, empathy, and personal expression. Using a wide spectrum of brown, yellow, orange, red, and pink crayons, they learn to select, layer, and carefully interpret the colors of one anotherʼs skin.

Emotions on Display
We finish the lesson with an interactive element by attaching the color paper that matches the intended zone behind the portrait in a lift-the-flap approach. Following a gallery-walk preview, we display the portraits with a simple sign that reads “What zone are we in?” Viewers guess and interpret each portraitʼs emotions, developing community emotional intelligence.

This lesson could be adapted to personify your own school-specific initiative or elaborate on more complex emotions or circumstances.

Kimberly Olson is an art teacher at Centre School, Hampton School District, SAU 90, in Hampton, New Hampshire. kabdesign@comcast.net