Colour-Coded Emotion Tags | Visual Feelings Support for Autism, ADHD & SEN

Help children show you how they're feeling - even when words are hard

Understanding emotions is a skill that takes time to develop. For some neurodivergent children, recognising what they're feeling - and then finding the words to communicate it - can be especially difficult.

The Colour-Coded Emotion Tags provide a simple, visual way for children to identify and express four different emotional states using clear facial expressions and easy-to-recognise colours.

Whether your child wants to tell you they're feeling calm, worried, sad or angry, they can point to or show the corresponding tag without needing to find the words themselves.

Small, durable and portable, they're a practical emotional communication tool for home, school, therapy sessions or while you're out and about.

💜 Why Thrive Recommends It

At Thrive Creations, we believe helping children regulate their emotions starts with helping them recognise what they're feeling.

As both a former remedial teacher and SEN parent, I know that asking "What's wrong?" doesn't always get an answer, especially when a child is already overwhelmed.

Visual emotion supports give children another way to communicate. Instead of needing to explain a complicated feeling, they can simply show us. And sometimes, feeling understood is the first step towards feeling regulated.

Four Colour-Coded Emotions

This set includes four durable visual emotion tags:

💚 Green - Happy / Calm
For those moments when your child feels settled, content and comfortable.

💛 Yellow - Worried
Helping children recognise and communicate feelings of worry or unease.

💙 Blue - Sad
A simple visual way to show when they're feeling low or upset.

❤️ Red - Angry / Upset
Helping children communicate those big, intense feelings when talking about them may be particularly difficult.

Who Might Benefit From These Emotion Tags?

These visual supports may be particularly helpful for children who:

- Find it difficult to identify their emotions
- Struggle to explain how they're feeling
- Benefit from visual communication
- Become less verbal when overwhelmed
- Are developing emotional awareness
- Prefer visual information to spoken questions
- Need consistent emotional language between home and school

Features

- Set of four colour-coded emotion tags
- Clear, expressive facial symbols
- Durable 3D-printed design
- Simple colour system for easy recognition
- Portable and easy to keep close by
- Designed for repeated everyday use
- Suitable for home, school and therapy settings

Perfect For

- Daily emotional check-ins
- Home
- School
- Therapy sessions
- Calm corners
- After-school check-ins
- Helping children communicate during big feelings
- Building emotional awareness

From Recognising Feelings to Understanding Them

Being able to identify "I'm in red" or "I'm feeling worried" is an important first step.

Over time, children can begin to make connections between their emotions, what happens in their bodies, what may have triggered the feeling and what helps them return to a more comfortable state.

These tags provide a simple starting point for those conversations without putting pressure on children to explain more than they're ready to.

Every Child Is Different

There is no one "right" way for a child to communicate their emotions.

Some children can easily tell us how they feel. Others communicate through behaviour, visuals, gestures or a combination of different methods. These emotion tags simply provide another tool - helping children communicate in the way that works best for them.

You May Also Like

Recognising an emotion is just the beginning. Once children can identify how they're feeling, they can start exploring what those feelings mean, why they happen and what might help. These Thrive Creations resources take that emotional learning one step further.

My Emotions & Regulation Workbook - helps children build a deeper understanding of their feelings through engaging, child-friendly activities. Designed for children aged approximately 4-10, it introduces four colour-coded Zones of Regulation and helps children recognise emotions and body signals, create their own personalised calming toolkit and practise emotional check-ins.

Used alongside these colour-coded emotion tags, it helps children move from "This is how I feel" towards "I understand what I'm feeling, and I'm learning what helps me."

Meet the Mood Mates

Sometimes understanding an emotion is easier when children can see someone else experiencing it too. Our Mood Mates book series brings big feelings to life through lovable characters and relatable stories - and three of the emotions represented in this tag set have their very own Mood Mate:

❤️ Feeling angry? Meet Blaze in Blaze and the Boiling Point, a story about anger, what happens when feelings reach boiling point and learning ways to cool back down.

💙 Feeling sad? Meet Drizzle in Drizzle and the Heavy Cloud, a gentle story that helps children understand sadness and discover that heavy feelings don't have to be carried alone.

💛 Feeling worried? Meet Wiggles in Wiggles and the What-If Whirl, which explores those spiralling "what if?" thoughts and helps children discover ways to manage worry when it starts taking over.

Together, the emotion tags, workbook and Mood Mates give children different ways to recognise, understand, talk about and navigate their feelings - because emotional learning doesn't look the same for every child.