Discovering the Emotions: Anger

Hello! My name is Martin and I’m in the first year at school. We’re learning letter sounds and I already know all of them! I can already write some of the letters too. There are still a lot of long words I can’t read, but mum says I’ll definitely learn all of them one day.

I live with my mum and dad in the square-shaped building right next to school. Since I can already count, I can tell you that it has six floors, and a different neighbour lives on each floor. Mum taught me how to spell ‘neighbour’, it’s a tricky word. There’s a playground in front of our building. After school and at the weekend, when the weather is nice, my friends and I go there to play.

Today there was no school, so I went straight out to the playground. We were playing ‘tag’, and it was a lot of fun, but when I was running I tripped over and scraped my knee. It really hurt! My trousers got torn, too. Mum wasn’t very happy about that.

When it happened, my knee stung so much I started crying. I was trying really hard to be brave and carry on playing, but a mum in the playground saw me and told me I didn’t have to put on a brave face.

“Go ahead and cry, if you feel like crying,” she said, smiling at me. “Without emotions we would be like robots.”

“Without emotions?...” I repeated. My voice was all wobbly from what had just happened.

“Emotions. That means feelings,” the lady said.

Well, I like robots, so I decided to try and find out more about feelings and maybe learn something about robots at the same time.

Where could I…