Primate feelings and communication activities
14th September 2009
Primate feelings and communication activities
By Lucy Garnett Co project coordinator.
Today we again visited Letaba special needs school, to give a talk to the children about feelings and emotions and how people can express their feelings.
We made a communication board for children whom find it hard to communicate feelings. This was created by our activities team, as the teachers has expressed the need for more communication with feelings. It was a simple 
jungle scene with three vervet monkeys that have no faces, and on a separate sheet there was 14 vervet monkey faces with 7 different expressions on, the aim of the board is to match their feelings with a face of one of the monkeys, where they stick the face onto the board. This seemed very effective and the children took to the board very well, they recognised the monkeys In the picture as the school has vervet monkeys around the grounds.
The children expressed times when they may feel sad, for example one girl said she would feel sad if someone in her family had died Another girl said she would feel excited when she passed her exam, another said she would feel worried if one of her family members was sick. The children appeared to relate well to this and were interacting well with the communication boards.
We then showed the children a short primate video, and explained how the monkeys behave, how they feel and that it is the same for humans sometimes. A lot of the children hadn’t heard of or seen some of the animals we were talking about, they appeared very interested when watching the video. They related to the emotions that we feel and how we all express feelings, they asked us questions about primates and how they feel. They also asked us lots of questions about the different primates they had seen in the video.
The talk appeared to go really well and all the children learnt that expressing feelings is a good thing, and that humans aren’t the only primate who does that. They were also encouraged to use the communication board with their teachers. They seemed happy and pleased to do this. The teachers said that this would help a lot with the children whom couldn’t communicate by words to express their feelings, worries, and emotions.
The day was rounded off by a game of football with the Yebo volunteers and the children, which we all thoroughly enjoyed.
