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Emotions are a tough topic for kids to tackle so today I'm sharing our Emotions Discovery Bottles, which is a fun DIY Toy or craft inspired by Disney's Inside Out. I've added a few affiliate links for easy reference, just FYI.

Although Inside Out came out a couple years ago now, we still consider emotions an important topic in our house. I shared this project back when the movie was new but we still talk about our emotions discovery bottles.

When we first saw the movie, we had about a day of sadness after seeing it… I think my daughter has my super strong sense of empathy. But we have recovered and used these characters to help us name our emotions, so I count it as a win!

With our emotions discovery bottles, I thought the kids would go grab the appropriate bottle when they felt the corresponding feeling but instead they like to have them all handy and make them interact. We have also watched other movies with our emotions bottles and used them to identify different feelings in the movie.

My lovely assistant decided to pretend to be all of the emotions during the photo shoot. Classic photo-bomb! She's a pro at 'em!

I'll give the ingredients for each one below but you can obviously make your own interpretations for the emotions! Making them with my daughter was part of the fun!

Related: Got Preschoolers? Grab this awesome homeschool preschool curriculum (created by a former teacher who made it easy for parents to educate at home)

Emotions Discovery Bottles Tutorial

First we raided the recycle bin for empty bottles. Joy and Disgust are empty plastic Voss Water bottles. Anger is something called Karma. Sadness is from a Cuties Juice that we got at Target. Fear is a Method Hand Soap bottle.

(And no, in case you are wondering, I did not hand my kids a “live” hand pump with purple glitter glue water in it. They are ALL hot glued, and the hand pump was filled on both ends with hot glue…then I hot glued it in the locked shut position. Of course you should always provide supervision in the creation and use of these bottles, you never know what could happen and I'm not responsible for any leaking bottles or anything like that! Yikes!)

Next we raided our craft stash, a lot of which was sent to up by Creatify-It.com and CraftProjectIdeas.com for free. The emotional eyes are foam stickers that came in the All Eyes On You Bin from Creatify It, which are available at Target. The mouths were all cut out of white contact paper.

You can talk to your children to decide what kind of materials the various emotions remind them of. My daughter had a lot of fun picking materials and thought of great ideas I never would have thought of. For example, I had marbles out to look like Sadness' tears but my daughter pointed out that we should use them as Core Memories, like in the movie.

Anger is this exact recipe for a glitter bottle from Craftulate. This Bubbling Bottle would also be super cool for anger! I love how he erupts when you shake him but when he calms down he is the size and shape of the one from the movie. This one is my 2 1/2 year old son's favorite. “Mommy, where is my Anger?” Haha.

Sadness is water, a drop of blue liquid watercolor, a little silver holographic glitter and blue marbles.

For Fear, first I used rubbing alcohol, a paper towel and my finger nail to scrap the letters off the Method bottle. Next, in a separate jar I poured VERY hot water and super fine purple glitter glue in and whisked until most of the lumps were gone. The specific glitter glue we used for the velvetty swirl was from this bag of Crayola Glitter Glue. Then we poured it into the bottle with a funnel and then my daughter added some purple holographic glitter.

Joy is made the same way as Fear, using glow in the dark yellow glitter glue and clear marbles but the marbles look darker for some reason. Technically she glows in a black light, kinda like Joy in the movie. We tried adding some blue pipe cleaners to look like her hair but they sank haha.

Disgust was made by mixing neon green acrylic paint with water, adding glitter and green marbles. I added one small paint pot from the Neon Acrylic Paints set, which you can see right above the letter L in Lalymom in the craft stash picture up there.

And that is that! If you liked this DIY Toy please pin it and share it on facebook!

Craft Closet Boredom Busters

Be sure to hop over and see all the posts at Frugal Fun for Boys' Craft Closet Boredom Busters Week! Here are the other Thursday posts!

Craft Stick Marble Run from Frugal Fun for Boys

Sparkly Fish Craft from Toddler Approved

Magnetic Astronaut and Rocket from JDaniel4's Mom

ABC Pool Noodle Beads from The Educators' Spin on It

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